Not only it happened at the worst possible time, but some pain points are entirely self-inflicted, like the braceless syntax hurting tooling and fragmenting the community for very little reason.

But in my opinion Databricks implicitly saying "no thanks" for the foreseeable future did a lot of damage here. Databricks didn't even bother bringing their proprietary runtime to Scala 2.13 until last year. Scala 3 is not entirely out of the question but it's taking forever, and at this point users can seriously ask themselves if Spark will actually stay relevant that long.