I was/am always glad to pay that tax because non-null-by-default and the vastly superior val/var keyword pairs are totally worth it but it for sure is not a drop-in replacement in team environments. I am already constantly battling the vscoders (to say nothing of vimers) whining that "IJ is too slow for my eeee-leeeet typin'"
That's so 2010. I would avoid Scala like plague. It is a soup of all features imagined and some more. Java is difficult for novice. With Scala even experienced senior devs can look into a snippet and be befuddled. It is designed by academicians who thought clever looking choice is better.
That's just not true. That's the typelevel ecosystem. The official Scala toolkit mostly includes haoyi libraries which is pretty much Python like Scala.
And the foothold in academics has some practical perks, too, like a sound type system (DOT calculus), compatibility guarantees at a theoretical level (TASTy), and what's cooking in the area of capture checking might be a general solution to many of the industry's biggest challenges (e.g. colorless asynchronous programming, safe errors, safe resource management, ... Think of Rust's borrow checker as a special case of this, and the consequences for scala-native as a systems programming platform).
This solves the public static void main string args issue.
Still if I need JVM then Scala or Kotlin are still preferable over Java.
Obligatory Java for the Haters in 100 Seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4-HM_sCvtQ