In my opinion, the people who went to use Scala were in two categories: people who wanted functional programming on the JVM and people who just wanted a better Java. As Java progressed and Kotlin launched the people that wanted a better Java either stuck with Java or moved to Kotlin.

Personally, I think Scala is a fantastic language, but it's had breaking changes, a functional only ecosystem, Java -> Scala interoperability is HARD, and the language is complex. Now there is Scala 3 and there are more breaking changes and the tooling landscape hasn't caught up.

No, not at all. It's just that Scala was hyped at a time and now it is a mature and stable language and hence "boring".

How often you hear of a language online does not reflect how much it is actually used. Nor does it reflect on how good the language is.