Yeah to be honest after trying for many years to understand what is so special about this famous Clojure REPL I struggled to see how it was that different in practice from Python or other languages. In Python you can also highlight a section code and send it to the console to be evaluated.

I think debuggers are just better anyways. When I got into the weeds trying to do this interactive REPL workflow on an actually running webapp it was a big mess. You have to write custom code all the time to basically capture data and save it into global variables, so that you can inspect them (as opposed to a debugger where you can just set a breakpoint and inspect all the variables in the middle of the precise spot in the request-response cycle).

I think maybe this was ahead of its time when it came out in 2008 or got popular in 2010-2015, but nowadays I am not seeing what's specifically more productive about the Clojure REPL than the interactive development experiences available in Laravel, Python, JS, etc.