I guess the background counts - I’ve been using Clojure in production since 2015 or 2016, and Lein project startup times were worse back then, so it forced everyone to adopt the REPL based workflow. I remember using CIDER, but I found it quite slow and buggy in some places (I don’t remember the specifics, it’s been a while) but once I stripped it down to what worked for me it was the scratch buffer and the REPL, and kinda worked my way from there understanding how everything is put together.
On top of that everyone on my team used a different editor, so I had to standardize a lot of our setup to work with anything that has an nREPL client (Vim, IntielliJ or VS Code).
And yes, I wouldn’t expect a total newcomer to do what I do, but I also feel like building your own workflow teaches you a lot about the language and its environment.