Note that part of the problem was that the library was written in a highly unusual literate style. So you had to clone the repo, then use Emac's Orgmode to tangle it to get the Clojure source code. This created a lot of friction for people to contribute.
Also before deps.edn (Clojure built-in dependency management) was added to the language you had to use leiningen which didn't make using a locally cloned fork as easy as it is now (now you just point to the library file directory and it "just works")
I'm pretty sure reach was the motivation. The author basically wrote his own TypeScript libraries duplicating a bunch of Clojure stuff, so the code is quite Clojure-like still.