Scala was always going to be hamstrung by the fact that it's a JVM language and yes, the crazy stuff people did with the language didn't help.

I agree w that, but I think Scala has deeper problems.

It tries to be a better Java and a better OCaml at the same time. This split personality led to Scala’s many dialects, which made it notorious for being difficult to read and reason about, particularly as a mainstream language contender.

Above all, Scala is considered a functional language with imperative OOP qualities. And it more or less fits that description. But like it or not primarily functional languages don’t have a strong reputation for building large maintainable enterprise software.

That’s the quiet part no one says out loud.

It’s like how in academic circles Lisp is considered the most pure and most powerful of programming languages, which may be true. At the same time most real-world decision makers see it as unsuitable as a mainstream language. If it were otherwise, we’d have seen a Lisp contend with imperative langs such as Java, C#, TypeScript, etc.

I’ve always attributed this disconnect to the fact that people naturally model the world around them as objects with state — people don’t think functionally.