Play2 is a fully fledged web framework. There is little reason to avoid it if you need that.
If you build a SPA or something like that, then I would avoid web frameworks and go with an http library such as cask (very simple and python-like) or http4s (quite advanced and great for concurrency, but requires you to learn some concepts before).
Independent of the licensing, I would avoid akka unless you have a real use case and can explain why you need akka. It's not a goto-library at all.
Use just plain Scala if you get started or an effect system like ZIO if you are more experienced or have experienced people on the team to help out.
