See this talk https://youtu.be/P8jrvyxHodU
He mentions module systems fairly early on.
What does this have to do with the original assertion that "one of Odersky's motives in creating Scala was bringing the power of Haskell into the JVM world"?
AFAIK, Odersky doesn't particularly like people trying to replicate Haskell patterns in Scala. For example, he thinks using monads for most effects is inappropriate.
My general assumption is that if Scala was intended to be category theory, implemented, something along the lines of scalaz or cats would have been built into the language -- the philosophy of the language does not include a JS-esque philosophy of small stdlib, big library ecosystem.