Unfortunately, "Scala as a worse Haskell" is alive and well. The /r/Scala subreddit, for example, is dominated by folks who tell every Scala-curious beginner who drops by that the accepted right way to write Scala is the pure FP ecosystem and everything else died a long time ago.

There are beautiful, simple, elegant ways to write Scala, but I'm afraid that the community isn't converging on a single concrete style, and a consensus around an abstract set of ideas about style isn't useful. Everybody agrees on words like "simple" and "elegant" and "readable," but I've seen some real abominations in Scala that people are tragically proud of. I'm afraid that Scala has attracted too many of the wrong kind of programmer, the kind that identifies their professional value with their ability to implement complex solutions that are intractable to their peers. The problem is not that you can't write simple code in Scala, but that people choose not to.

I don't want to blame the pure FP style of Scala itself, because I've seen the same problems in the "better Java" style as well, and because I'm still thinking that I might be able to write good code in this style and might even come to prefer it. But oh man, the Scala programmers I've personally worked with who embrace pure FP have really screwed up priorities.