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.
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.
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.