Which moderators exactly? That hasn't been the stance of people in the Scala Center, Typesafe/Lightbend, VirtusLab and SoftwareMill.

ScalaZ is old news and if you went there (on IRC at the time) you knew exactly what you wanted. It doesn't excuse people being assholes, and the Typelevel schism happened partly because of that. Since then people on Gitter and now Discord have been nothing but kind and welcoming to newbies. Same in the ZIO community.

Of course, people building FP libraries will defend their ways. Odersky doesn't build the library ecosystem, and without the FP community Scala 3 would pretty much have killed the language entirely, as nothing else was ready until a few years later. It makes sense that people keeping the main open source communities alive have a bigger presence in the broader community, it's almost tautological.

I haven't seen a huge deal of momentum around Li Haoyi's libraries for instance, they're very much used in their narrow scope, but there's no ecosystem per se. Even his own build tool struggles there despite the technical merits, and he's been advertising Mill non-stop in the past years.

You can't force people to buy into your way of doing things. If there was space for a great non-functional landscape built in Scala then it would exist. Nobody stops you from building and gathering with like-minded people.