Well, from that point of view, static typing in general is just syntactic sugar. In fact type erasure is one of the best things going for Java, because they haven't screwed the runtime for other languages (e.g. Scala, JRuby, Clojure). Ironically it is the JVM that turned out to be the multi-language VM, with the CLR having only languages that have basically C#'s type system.

No, the problem with Java generics is that covariance / contravariance rules are "call site", specified with wildcards, which are awkward and hard to reason about, versus "declaration site" in Scala and C#.

Scala also has higher kinded types, one of the few languages actually. In combination with making it possible to encode type-classes, by means of plain traits along with implicits, you can express Haskell's powerful abstractions in Scala. You don't see libraries like Cats or Scalaz in other languages like Java or C# or F# for that matter, because they can't be expressed in languages without higher kinded types.