I believe the use of "~>" rather than "->" in Racket was set in #lang rackjure which adds in some of the Clojure syntax to Racket. Also amusing is their explanation:
> For example the threading macros are ~> and ~>> (using ~ instead of -) because Racket already uses -> for contracts. Plus as Danny Yoo pointed out to me, ~ is more "thready".
This:
(- (bytes-ref (string->bytes/utf-8 (symbol->string 'abc)) 1) 2)
Becomes this:
(~> 'abc
https://docs.racket-lang.org/threading/index.html