"it can be very hard to follow": I agree, if you are not a lisp developer it's really hard, but if you develop clojure everyday, it's as easy as anything else.
The answer is usually clean code when it comes to clojure. Keep your functions small.
"more memory intensive, and generally slower": yep, the JVM is more memory intensive than Go. No surprise there and Clojure adds up on top of that. Startup times are pretty slow too. But compared to python it's still fast. Apples to oranges.
I would say Clojure and Go are both great languages that tackle different problems so it's not a fair comparison.