You cannot compare Clojure and Rust in any way as they're completely different design philosophies.
It lacks some polish and has some wierd conventions relative to modern Clojure, but I still use it occasionally.
Do you just mean that things are improving less quickly than they are for, e.g., Typescript?
I think it's a "death by a 1000 cuts"/"broken windows" that is may be happening when the ecosystem lacks funding to take care of the boring maintenancey stuff. If I remember well, this is a conscious choice by Rich Hickey, a choice that one should respect, but will prevent Clojure from ever getting to the next level IMO.
I installed Spacemacs fresh, loaded up a Clojure file, and not only did I get automatically get CIDER, but I also got LSP support via clj-kondo and a bunch of other extras. I was genuinely impressed at how mature the tooling was, and how trivial it was to install.
What I am kinda saying is that Clojure would be in a better place if it was paying people like you a lot more!
Since there is no obvious right way, there's little consistency between projects - which means you're likely to follow the wrong path if you follow the wrong README or pick an outdated starter template. This forces developers to make a ton of orthogonal choices up front before they even begin coding.
Case in point: https://clojurescript.org/tools/tools lists 4 different build tools without any explanation as to how they relate or why you might pick one over the other. But don't worry, you'll find out after days of tedious research!
If Clojure had a consistent out-of-the-box experience like Go or Rust, I think it could rule the world. It's a great language but the developer experience is a serious impediment to that.
At work, we have a codebase of over 142K lines of Clojure, some of which dates back over a decade. We started with Leiningen (because it was the only game in town). We migrated to Boot in 2015 because we needed easier customization of our dev/test/build pipeline and Boot's "tasks" were a more natural fit. We migrated to Clojure CLI / deps.edn in 2018 because we were running into limitations with Boot as our repository grew and our needs for dev/test/build became more complex.
Each migration took about a week of one person's time.
Over that same period of time, I've probably switched my editor setup a dozen times, going back and forth between Emacs and several other editors/IDEs. I've been on VS Code/Calva for quite a while now -- with LSP/clj-kondo built-in, it's a really solid experience.
There's a bit of a chicken and egg, because once you know, you know, and the problem disappears, but that doesn't help the next beginner have an easier time.
The big exception is ClojureScript. I haven't personally noticed bitrot as much as ClojureScript being generally flaky. I think the situation is improving, though, and the unreliability is mostly in compilation and hot-reloading, not at runtime.
I think Clojure could use more funding to improve tooling, but I do think we have made strides with the funding we have.
A few years back there was a 3 month window where I had everything (lein,fighweel, emacs) configured just right, and I could reliably start a Clojure REPL, a Clojure Script REPL connected to a browser window, and switch between them from emacs.
It was really productive, I could work on the backend parts, frontend parts, and effortly switch between REPLS, but then there were some updates and I never got it working without friction again.
That's actually why it is interesting to compare them. Comparing things that are the same would quickly become very boring.
For instance, one domain where Clojure shines is for complex web apps, as your frontend and backend are in the same language, and can be tightly integrated. I believe dustingetz is working on taking this to the next level.