Which is a shame because I did a hobby project with it and it was super fun and liberating compared to old java.

Well, they didn’t break the existing language, so not sure. It depends on what do you find readable/difficult. Because contrary to the usual opinion on the language, I believe it is not “difficult” - it has much fewer exceptional rules than Java for example. Sure, some features are more expressive and that comes with big responsibility, but to actually answer your question, some implicit usage is indeed cleaned up making it much less magical-looking.

But scala 3 has been a very huge update, including having a new compile flag that will turn to language “null-safe” (so a nullable String will have String | Null as a type). So it might be worth it to have a new look at the language.