Most of those things are improved upon by Kotlin as well, and seems like an easier upgrade path from Java anyway vs Scala.
Kotlin is also much more popular than Scala.
Kotlin is also much more popular than Scala.
That's not what (at least some) numbers say. Both Scala and Kotlin are 14th.
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2024/09/12/language-rankings-6-2...
Kotlin may be more popular, but not much. It's nowhere near the mainstream languages like Java, Python, JavaScript, C# or PHP. Not even close to TypeScript.
That said, probably "number of Github projects" and/or "number of StackOverflow tags" doesn't encapsulate the sheer amount of code written in Kotlin for Android apps, which is where my head was probably at.
5-8 years ago Scala had a large boost in data science/big data work as it was either it or Python for a lot of frameworks like Spark. We used Scala because we wanted static typing and threading (among other things) for our workloads.