Scala gives you an immense freedom and you can do things in many, many ways.

The problem is that when you work in an enterprise project, you need people to write idiomatic code.

In Scala, it is not clear what idiomatic code looks like. Imperative and object oriented? With higher order functions? Or fully functional with monads and monad transformers?

So were you writing applets and swing applications? It was a completely different time! However, a lot of Java 2 code can run on Java 25 with small changes!

Java switched to a rapid release cycle in September 2017, when the six-month, time-based release cadence was first proposed and implemented. Starting with Java 10 in March 2018, a new version is released every March and September.

Many Java versions are actually ignored by developers, who only use Long-Term Support (LTS) versions, that are released every two years.

Could you please explain your point of view more clearly? It seems you presume other people should not find the Scala language interesting because you do not.

They removed ScalaZ library from the Scala community build in one of the peak moments of the Scala programming language popularity. It was widely seen as a non-transparent, harmful action that damaged trust and seemed punitive. An outside evaluator called it a “red flag” and a “significant risk factor”.

Jon Pretty lost his job, income, home, pension, and reputation overnight. He also resigned from his job, gave away his open-source projects, and became homeless. He won in court. The court order required signatories to withdraw their signatures and statements.

There also was a very toxic environment in the Scala world. See the cases of Tony Morris and Jon Pretty.

Because Scala allowed you to write much less code than Java. After Java was bought by Oracle, they shifted to a faster release cadence and new features. But developers still had to use things like Lombok, Guava, and Apache Commons to have an easier way to do things.

Now, both Kotlin and Java 25 have a lot of the features that Scala was the first to introduce, so it does not seem important. But it was very important back then.

Also, the Big Data world was embracing Scala. Apache Spark is written in Scala and so many other important tools and libraries in the Big Data ecosystem were in Scala.

Edit. Fixed information about releases after Oracle acquisition.

So many former Scala and Haskell developers moved to Rust.

Rust is currently more famous and widely adopted than Scala ever was.