The other part, doing away with monads, is also exciting for FP nerds like me, but probably less generally exciting as it doesn't add new capabilities to the language so much as make existing capabilities easier to use (puns intended, of course!)
Still, F# could only dream to have half as much adoption as Scala.
As you say though, really we've seen a shift in a direction I didn't expect as much, more toward languages that aren't bringing a virtual machine. Even the dialog at work talks about elastic computing where the JVM is less of a dominant player than something that uses fewer resources and starts fast.
Go has really become the poster child for a lot of this momentum in my circles... intentionally not an elaborate language, good ecosystem, good runtime characteristics. I personally don't really want to be moving to Go, but the gulf between status quo and "moves the needle" languages has grown, not shrunk, these last few years, it feels.
If anything Scala 3 was an attempt to standardize and reduce some of the existing complexity to make it more widely appealing.
I know that's the argument, but I think it ends up the opposite. Splitting one consistent feature into three overlapping subsets is not a simplification in my book - it might make the easy cases slightly easier, but it makes the hard cases much harder.
