AFAIK it's an excellent language let down by political in-fighting in the ecosystem and subsequent fragmentation of is otherwise 'standard' libraries. IMO this kills the language.
Kotlin offers most of what Scala does with a much more solid and supportive ecosystem, it's the obvious winner in the ecological niche of 'better JVM languages', for me.
As AI and other forms of automation become more prevalent in our lives it has become urgent to teach kids about different forms of programming/AI/ML and their characteristics. The current situation is a shit show: too many people think 'ChatGPT' is merely plugged into everything and it's just not like that.