Zio is pretty much what you want. No need to understand category theory, no over-reliance on implicit resolution, ... That said you don't need to understand th

Zio is pretty much what you want. No need to understand category theory, no over-reliance on implicit resolution, ... That said you don't need to understand that much to use high-level libraries in the Typelevel ecosystem. And when I do need to reach for low-level constructs, I find nice that everything is built upon clean and composable abstractions. You mention Akka, it's kind of its own beast. The inner workings go definitely way beyond "better Java", yet Lightbend needs to provide a surface API that plays nice with Java interop. It's not an ecosystem easy to navigate in my opinion.