Spot on. Thankfully it is becoming more common to Just Write Java. Java without the frameworks and other bloated crap is actually decent. The language itself has a lot of warts, but the Java ecosystem is one of the best (Python too).
This is how I feel about the language! Modern Java works well enough to me that the frameworks are nearly never justified.
What ecosystem? The JVM doesn’t require Java. Scala is pretty much categorically better in every way than Java.
Not in maintainability. It is pretty hard to follow Scala when people use the flexibility too much. You have so many options that everyone develops their own flavor of overrides/overloads and style. This makes transferring skills between jobs or even just projects much harder as the same looking code line can mean several things.