None of your reasons ("preference, syntax, pragmatism") fully explain the situation without more context. Whose preference? What syntax are users even seeing? Why is it pragmatic?

Compilation targets are generally chosen based on performance characteristics and where the code is actually expected to be run. If you're not expecting the code to run on the client, then there's no reason to use JavaScript. V8 performance is better when single-threaded, but then why use the actor model?

When I go to the ClojureScript website, they have a whole section about why they chose JavaScript as a compilation target[0]. Notably, it mentions the word "client" multiple times.

[0] https://clojurescript.org/about/rationale