Out of curiosity, what does everyone despise about Groovy?
Updated for Scalia to Scala.
You mean James Strachan? That was 8 years ago. In November last year he said "I still love groovy (jenkins pipelines are so groovy!), java, go, typescript and kotlin. I don't use Scala anymore." [1]
Sounds like he uses Kotlin instead of Scala, and only uses Apache Groovy in Jenkins pipelines. And given that the Groovy collections methods are disabled so they don't actually work in Jenkins, I imagine he uses Java 8 or Kotlin for that purpose.