I would say that having lost the adoption wave, especially since Google got cozy with JetBrains, thus making Kotlin unavoidable on Android, and all big data solutions that were powered by Scala going into modern C++/Go/Rust, eventually the only thing left to keep Scala relevant is to be Haskell on the JVM.

Still, F# could only dream to have half as much adoption as Scala.

My job has been making a tactical retreat from Scala, and it's really fascinating to look to alternatives like F# and see that they're even less "successful", from an adoption point of view. I'm surprised at how little success even marginally higher-level languages than C# or Java are having.

As you say though, really we've seen a shift in a direction I didn't expect as much, more toward languages that aren't bringing a virtual machine. Even the dialog at work talks about elastic computing where the JVM is less of a dominant player than something that uses fewer resources and starts fast.

Go has really become the poster child for a lot of this momentum in my circles... intentionally not an elaborate language, good ecosystem, good runtime characteristics. I personally don't really want to be moving to Go, but the gulf between status quo and "moves the needle" languages has grown, not shrunk, these last few years, it feels.