I think it's less true nowadays. You have beginner's books (Scala from Scratch, Hands-on Scala) that assume nothing, and more advanced libraries (in the Typelevel or ZIO ecosystems) that provide high-level abstractions for real world projects. You can't entirely avoid being exposed at some point to the JVM inner workings and/or Java libraries that don't necessarily play well, but this doesn't have to happen right away.