I think you missed the overall point of the author, which was that in order make a significant improvement at all, you need to make a radical shift in the modelling of the system. One of the problems mentioned was the inherent complexity of using a type system for modelling data. Scala is very type oriented and so as a result you will end up with a lot of types for everything there as well.

Yes it's certainly easier to make a transition into Scala, but I don't think using Scala will solve the actual problem, even if it does have FP capabilities and encourage immutability.