There are two flavors of Scala and only one of them is about cats/scalaz. I feel intellectually inferior to people who use the latter in production. But I don't think anymore it's a reasonable aspiration to become one of them. And maven builds Scala projects equally well (with half a screen of XML) and without any SBT complexity.

I have not seen Bay Area companies where previous Scala experience counts for more than inviting me to an interview. In my current team I know multiple developers who'd like to have more Scala and Java developers who don't know Scala or even Kotlin.