He explains how he created Clojure explicitly as a hosted language. After the JVM implementation, it quickly got implemented for CLR, and then JS (ClojureScript), and both are full implementations, not just look-alike.
By all accounts, though, Clojure became as popular as it is because of the JVM, not despite it.
Btw, Rich had two versions of Clojure - Java (JVM) and .NET (CLR) and shortly before releasing it he decided to focus on the Java one, and deleted the .NET one.
ClojureCLR still exists and is somewhat maintained (last commit was last year, but then again, little has happened in the clojure world in the past year so I'd still use it): https://clojure.org/about/clojureclr
By all accounts, though, Clojure became as popular as it is because of the JVM, not despite it.