This was my experience as well. I worked at a place that used Scala primarily in the "better Java" style and enjoyed the language a lot. I moved to a different

This was my experience as well. I worked at a place that used Scala primarily in the "better Java" style and enjoyed the language a lot. I moved to a different company and the lead programmer there was a functional purist who insisted on putting scalaz/cats into everything and using Scala as Haskell lite, despite it really not being appropriate for the use case. It really soured me on the language.