I had similar feelings, and I get the same feelings looking at today's front end development which looks increasingly like embedded C++ development. I had always tinkered with Lisp but expected it to be forever marginalized given how good Common Lisp was, and how poorly it had been adopted by industry. But Clojure changed that for me. The fun seems to come from agency, the ability to affect outcomes with reasonable amounts of time and energy expended. Agency is the ability to change one's circumstances, and modern tool chain's vast incidental complexity takes such agency away. But restore agency, and fun will follow, I suspect.

Now I don't mean to imply there are not good uses for tool chains like C++'s etc. Only I will say that the disconnection from the end result caused by the long write-debug-ship cycle leads to a certain programmer malaise. The same is true for things like coding chips with Verilog. The production chain is so long with respect to the creative endeavor itself that motivation and satisfaction is hard to get.

So, for me, doing SaaS software, which ships "all the time" with Clojure, has restored my ability to 1) read the std library and most others easily to understand them, 2) Create control, preprocessing and IO primitives myself for special purposes which easily rival standard ones, 3) use interop to access large libraries written in another long lived language (Java), 4) build and use tools that simply introspect the code, producing my own tool additions and automations without AST's, and elaborate tooling, after all, code is just data.

Obviously YMMV. One blog post documented someone who changed from C++ to Clojure and did not find satisfaction. But he was attempting to do something, embedded I believe, that is not well suited to a JVM. So changing to Clojure does involve changing to an area that favors one of the two big Clojure host language machines, JVM or Javascript based environments.