This has to be a show and not tell thing. Most developers couldn’t care less about the theoretical underpinnings of languages. They care about what gets the job done easier. This leads to path of least resistance a lot of times, unfortunately.
Jira’s a good example. Yes, it’s quirky and annoying, but dealing with those quirks is better than having the ticket system replaced every couple of years because some new shiny thing came along. While most people hate using it, they don’t really care about ticket systems and use whatever the company decided to go with. Trying to get it changed isn’t a fight that’s worth fighting.
As far as getting Clojure adopted, start with non-prod tools, test environments, things like that. When people start to see what it can do, they’ll be more likely to get on board with it.
In general, though, languages become popular due to what problems they solve, not how well designed they are. Go’s a good example. The one thing I keep hearing about it is “it’s a horrible language, but a great tool.” Java was the first to have native performance without needing to compile to native, so it exploded. Javascript became the language of the web. Python found its niche with data science and testing. Clojure needs something like that for people to move to it en-mass. As long as it’s solving the same problems in a different way, it’ll remain niche. Which might actually be better because there won’t be pressure to add little features that aren’t generally useful.