I personally love scala: It's been my main language at work for well over a decade. However, the barriers of entry are real, especially since arguably the most popular styles of the language demand learning the most esoteric parts of the language straight away. If your organization is well seeded with very experienced people, they'll be able to train people up, but it's oh so easy for things to go wrong.
If you are looking for all the advanced type system features, kotlin is definitely not going to put you in the same spot, but if you are hiring Java devs, training them is a far easier lift: They can mostly train themselves.
I'd hope that after another version or two of scala3, when more organizations are happy running it in production, we might have an easier onboarding road, where we don't have to explain implicit parameters, implicit conversions and implicit classes, just so that we can get to the real meat that is the mechanics of type classes. But, as is, there's good defensible reasons for many teams to go try Kotlin first.
Agreed. If somebody doesn't know Java and decides to jump to Kotlin, I will have the same question: why not Scala which is used more than Kotlin on computers (i.e. non-Android)?
I'm not necessarily advocating for Kotlin but the key argument would be supportability. Scala is a very complex language+ecosystem with idioms many people are highly unfamiliar with. Comparatively, Kotlin can be written idiomatically in a way that the vast majority of developers will readily understand and quickly come up to speed with.
