> Scala doesn't force these on you

Yea but one cannot write everything from scratch. I had to work on project that use cats, scalz and stuff. I felt like i was splitting an atom when i was actually writing a crud app :) .

Obsession with those theoretical concepts with dubious and unproven benefits is deeply interwoven in community. Cost of learning cats vs benefit is just absurd.

I would only recommend scala to programming language nerds that want to sound smart.