> I definitely agree that many newer languages are strongly inspired by Scala, but I don't see a strong argument for why to choose Scala over one of a newer hybrid language. My own intuition is that these newer languages have had the benefit of being able to learn from Scala's mistakes. A lot of them have intentionally sacrificed some of the Scala's flexibility to be easier to learn and use.

I don't believe any of those new alternatives has made better choices; some of them haven't had time to accumulate as many warts as Scala yet, but all of the ones I've seen have design decisions that make them inevitable. Higher-kinded types still work much better than every other way of achieving the same things that's been found - and if you want both higher-kinded types and decent tooling/library support, Scala is still pretty much the only option. (Haskell exists, but even if you consider its tooling good enough, implicit pervasive laziness has huge costs).