That is a common trend on JVM guest languages, to blame Java or the JVM for their impedance mismatch with the host platform.
Granted, this usually only comes from those that don't bother much to learn about the underlying platform and are sometimes even agressive against what actually made their favourite guest language possible to exist.
> what actually made their favourite guest language possible to exist.
maybe i'm arguing semantics, but i don't think it's fair to say that the JVM "made Clojure possible" -- that's like saying "C made Python possible because CPython is written in C".
iirc the JVM was chosen as a backend because that's what Clojure's creator had to work/interop with. and i think that's generally the case with "guest" languages -- there's an environment you want to write code for (JVM/ browser), but you don't want to use its "official" language (Java/JS), so you create a new language and adapt it to run there.
and sure, reusing the Java stdlib and other existing code can help bootstrap a language, no doubt about that, but it's a stretch to say it makes it "possible"
Clojure's success lies in being a Lisp that takes advantage of the JVM libraries and JVM monitoring tools, without them it would be just yet another Lisp clone like so many others since the early 60's.
i guess i was being a bit pedantic... as you say, if you look at Clojure's whole programming environment (tooling, stdlib) and not just the language itself, putting it like GP did makes sense.
Granted, this usually only comes from those that don't bother much to learn about the underlying platform and are sometimes even agressive against what actually made their favourite guest language possible to exist.