That is complete BS, I didn't drink the Kool-Aid and was able to get the job done in a way that didn't use mega pattern matching functions, which are particularly loved by some (especially scalac) but not all. Martin also preferred lazy evaluation over incremental and reactive computation, and that was that. If you look at my recent IDE demoes (on YouTube or just see my papers), you'll see where Scala could have gone vs. where it is now.

The Scala community eventually drifted away from OO, but it could have gone very differently.