I am a Scheme developer and I work on type theory / logic programming / etc. [A side gig these days.] In general Lisps work very well when you have complicated datatypes that don't boil down very easily to fixed object/type systems, or are a bit tenuous and subject to significant change. I think it is overkill for a simple terminal utility but it would be a great choice for something similar to Norton Commander.

And keep in mind a lot of modern CLI tools are written in Python or JavaScript. Lisp's disadvantage here is in the smaller talent pool, not anything about the runtime.

A binary has a startup time of like 20 milliseconds, the overwhelming majority of that is setting up page tables iirc. While that's a lot for a small cli utility called in a loop, it's really nothing for a desktop application.

I wish more desktop applications could hit even a 100ms startup time. These days it feels like 5 seconds or more is the norm.