Hm, I use Spacemacs particularly because of the easy config.
That said, you're right: you should just be able to use vim, and historically CIDER has been the dominant (most polished) environment. At Clojurists Together Foundation, we're trying to fix that though: a lot of our funding has gone towards IDE development including for vim. Some of it towards CIDER also benefits vim because they share internals.
It's worth mentioning that BBatsov, the creator of CIDER, maintains a practically zero-config Emacs distribution, Prelude. A novice interested in Clojure could install Prelude, and start coding Clojure and other popular languages using pre-configured packages in, let's say, 15-30 minutes. The difference from Spacemacs is that Prelude is much simpler, does not mess with Emacs defaults, is close to vanilla Emacs, and has been super stable for years.
aaand I guess that's what ppl mean by "ergonomics issues".
Emacs is very stable, quite logical in some sense, but also hasn't kept up with the times and doesn't default to those typical keyboard shortcuts, which most newer editors almost all share...
but this has been discussed countless times before on twitter, clojureverse.org etc...
That said, you're right: you should just be able to use vim, and historically CIDER has been the dominant (most polished) environment. At Clojurists Together Foundation, we're trying to fix that though: a lot of our funding has gone towards IDE development including for vim. Some of it towards CIDER also benefits vim because they share internals.
[0]: https://clojuriststogheter.org