Notoriously steep learning curve

Yeah this is kind of weird. If you just learn the features that are both in Scala & Python (which was rated 10/10 here), it's easier to learn those in Scala, because they are better designed and more uniform. (eg: in scala you don't even need to know that there's a difference between an if statement and and if expression, you don't have variables that will escape their scope with random values, etc.)

Python also has a good number of advanced features, but somehow those are rarely mentioned in the "is it hard to learn context"

Another aspect could be that 5-10 years ago Akka was a lot more popular while Cats just started to become popular and there were a lot of attempts mixing and abusing both. In 2026 approaches are a lot more settled. People are also far less likely to put tagless final in a server with 3 endpoints, or use Akka for single threaded code or put Any everywhere and stuff like that.

productivity

This is also strange. How do we define productivity? If your definitions is "some shit that runs some of the time and does something", then sure Python is 10/10. If you want a correctly working program Scala will be more productive (the only exception here is library availability, Python has some domains which are not as developed in the JVM world)

Plus Scala has worksheets, that allow quick prototyping with immediate response.

Also one of the best REPLs among the mainstream languages.