Yeah the extreme FP stuff works for some people, but not others, and that subcommunity has traditionally been very loud. I've been pushing hard on using Scala in a more hybrid way over the years, first with my open source libraries and then with my book Hands-on Scala. I think I've had some success in pushing this.
There's definitely been a shift in the community in this direction. While the hardcore-FP folks are still around, as are the hardcore-Reactive folks, there are now many others using Scala in this more simple, simplistic way to good effect. Scala is a big tent and every
subcommunity can find things they like even if they don't always agree
In my view though, Kotlin is just a much better version of that. But of course if you have lots of scala investment already, it makes more sense to do it within scala itself.
It comes with the same easy Java interop, but is a much smaller simpler language, while in my view managing to include essentially all of the most useful ergonomic improvements (over Java) that Scala does, but with essentially none of the more complex baggage.
There's definitely been a shift in the community in this direction. While the hardcore-FP folks are still around, as are the hardcore-Reactive folks, there are now many others using Scala in this more simple, simplistic way to good effect. Scala is a big tent and every subcommunity can find things they like even if they don't always agree