I'm a designer and not a coder, so I feel obliged to provide my comments with salt added up front.
That being said, JSX vs. wrapping HTML in if-statements seems like the same kind of trouble to me. I've done a few simple prototypes in Clojure/Script, so my reasoning is heavily influenced by the fact that I know very little about other languages, and only have moderate amount of knowledge about Clojure.
The solution I've encountered in Clojure is to represent the entire page as a data structure. Conditionals and transformations are applied directly to this data structure, which is then sent as-is into the rendering pipeline (which commonly seems to be React). The HTML is never really written by hand, it's just a final "coat of paint" on top of the data.
To me, this seems far easier to wrap my head around than splicing two languages together in the same file and potentially finding that the interaction between the two is not as harmonious as one may wish.
Rendering to HTML, rather than rendering within HTML (so to speak), seems like it would remove the entire decision point where you have to pick between one library or the other based on the quirks of how it looks when it's spliced into HTML.
Can you tell me what clojure libraries/frameworks work the way you describe? I'm learning clojure and would like to build some toy web apps because I've never done webdev before.
lein new figwheel
Like the sibling comment pointed out, Reagent uses Hiccup-style data structures to represent HTML. Om can be configured to do the same, but doesn't out of the box last time I checked. Either way, the Hiccup syntax looks like this:
[:div [:h1 "Hello world"]]
Add either Reagent or Om to your project.clj, and off you go.
[1]: https://github.com/bhauman/lein-figwheel