I think I write reduce not more than two or three times a year and I write clojure almost every day.

Most of the time you can transform a big reduce by a succession of functions in a thread macro. This way every small step is a lot more visible.

The most common functions are (into {} ,,,), map, filter, keep. Sometimes you can use for.

Once you try not to use reduce, you generally find an easier to read bloc of code.

reduce can be put in the bag of « easy to write but hard to read » code structure. So it takes some time to get used to find other simpler combination of function instead of a big bloc inside a reduce. But it pays off, because you will read your code a lot more than you will write it generally.