I worked at Databricks in the past and Scala is just a way to get things done there. Honestly, for me writing code day-to-day wasn't that different from Java once you understand how to structure your classes. Handling nullables with typed Options is pretty nice though, and I miss it in other languages now. Most people who join Databricks do not know Scala beforehand, it's just a useful tool.

Sure, sometimes progress is slower than you'd like, but that's the case in every large monorepo.