If only the Ruby ecosystem had adopted Scala instead of Ruby, with cutesy books and eccentric underscored personalities, history might have been different.
Just debate the ideas with the merits in the source code, ignore the haters, and be kind and helpful. It's not difficult to do.
Mainstream adoption isn't everything and I still mostly use Scala for personal projects, but it's such a different world working in a language where the major open source projects have industry backing. The Scala community, meanwhile, seems mostly stuck starting entirely new FP frameworks every other week. Nothing against that, but I don't see that much advantage to choosing Scala over OCaml at this point (if you don't need JVM integration).
Momentum appears to be behind Rust now, of course, but I've yet to be convinced. If it had a better GPU story and could replace C/C++ entirely I'd be on board, but otherwise I want my everyday language to be a bit closer to Python/Ruby on the scale against C/C++.
Ruby was a great little niche language until Rails showed up.
Scala did not exist when Rails was written/extracted. When Scala was released, it did not include any of the things that made Ruby a good choice for Rails.