The code they write is less about implementing some business functionality in the most elegant way possible. But rather it's an exercise in who can use the most obscure parts of the language.
And unfortunately there are far too many obscure parts.
I think it's rather more likely that you simply don't understand why they're using the more obscure parts of the language on any given problem. They're probably trying to rule out certain invalid uses as type errors, which is typically encouraged in the more advanced typed languages.
Most Scala developers are in the A bracket. The experts are in the L. The code written by either is so different they could almost be different languages. You don't get this sort of split in Swift, Java etc.
All languages have this. You could write more or less the same list for Swift or Java with minimal changes.
Again, do you have any actual experience with this, or is this just your assumption? Because I have never seen this issue in the wild.
At the extreme of the first group you'd have people for whom it seemed like every problem was best solved with a higher-kinded-type. And while it might well have been technically (and mathematically) elegant, the rest of the team was left scratching their heads trying to understand it.