Grandparent programs in Clojure which doesn't use
car and
cdr.
ANSI Common Lisp has first and rest as synonyms of car and cdr. Books from the middle 1980s on the then emerging Common Lisp already cover this.
It's like you're griping about an issue that was closed before CVS existed, let alone git.
car and cdr still exist because of backward compatibility and because they are good names for when cons cell structure is just arbitrary structure and not a list. The car is not always the first item of a list, and cdr is not always the continuation of a list. These words are deeply entrenched in the Lisp culture. The words have no confusing associations with anything else but the parts of a cons cell. I've not come across any "car" or "cdr" usage in computing anywhere, except Lisp-inspired jokes like in the "Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol". In the telecomm industry, CDR stands for "call detail record", but that's removed from programming language and data structuring.
Knuth defined some binary-cell tree structures in TAOCP. He used the words alink and blink (as in A link, B link). Those words are not bad.
It's good if the parts of a flexible data structure that programs use for representing all kinds of things have names that don't have any confusing associations. When you see those names, you know they are just literally about that structure, and you can see from how those words are used what the shape of the structure is.