Clojure is almost 10 years old. I don't think this reasoning makes sense though, because from what I've seen most of the cruft in any language comes from the very early design decisions (both in what's included and what's missing).
Cruft in a language isn't such a big deal as long as it is fixed. What really matters is cruft in the ecosystem. There are so many Clojure tutorials that use "use" and "refer". That's the real problem. JavaScript has with(), but there are approximately 0 articles online that use it, so its not an issue.
