IMO Scala has a lot of very well thought out features that complement each other, and this is only going to get better with the move towards Dotty.
For me it feels not as bloated as other languages which added features without thinking about how they fit to the existing ones. But I work a lot on Scala, so I'm probably biased since I know the language better than i.e. Typescript :)
The problem / challenge is that there is too many choices, too many ways to tackle a certain problem, and every library you find will have a different method. Plus each one introduces some university / Phd level mechanic that most developers (e.g. me) don't understand.
I understand the problem with that, and agree with you.
While it can be very empowering to have a "sandbox" language, when it comes to shipping features and working in a team setting, it can require a lot of discipline to keep the codebase approachable for others. Languages like Go or even Python seem to help a lot in there by having strong conventions and an "obvious" way to do things.
