This is the exact opposite of my experience. All the Scala I've seen "in the wild" is basically Java with a slightly different syntax. All OO, with the odd high-level function thrown in to prove something I guess.

After ~18 years of Java I was feeling very burnt out. Initially it was the concurrency model and how it was being widely used. This itself drove me to find alternatives.

I started off knowing that Go, Scala, and Clojure (among others) offered cleaner abstractions on this. I figured I'd learn them a little and see where that took me - Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks was the book I first looked at.

It honestly didn't take long, but something with Clojure just clicked with me. Concurrency aside, the REPL experience and immutable data grabbed me and said "Keep learning this language!"

So I took an old game that I'd done in Java (with OpenGL bindings) and started rewriting it in Clojure. Loved the experience and kept working on any problems I could find to try out the functional approaches I was learning.

The punch-line is I fell in love with programming again. I was able to find my passion, to realize again why I went into this field. Slowly turned the career direction and now work full time with Clojure.