This thread is interesting; so many tools and libraries referenced that I am not familiar with at all. I think some of us are writing very different languages.
I've used Scala my entire career at multiple companies, and Typelevel has been the default at all of them. I'm not even entirely sure where Scala ends and Cats begins, so it's hard to identify what's "fancy", let alone justify it. I do like IO, and monad transformers. I think neither of those are native. Flat code tends to be maintainable.
From my perspective, fully baked frameworks and ORMs are what's "fancy" (a readability nightmare). I don't know if it's a cultural thing, but Scala codebases that go hard on FP tend not to introduce these, which I appreciate. Pick your poison I guess.
I've used Scala my entire career at multiple companies, and Typelevel has been the default at all of them. I'm not even entirely sure where Scala ends and Cats begins, so it's hard to identify what's "fancy", let alone justify it. I do like IO, and monad transformers. I think neither of those are native. Flat code tends to be maintainable.
From my perspective, fully baked frameworks and ORMs are what's "fancy" (a readability nightmare). I don't know if it's a cultural thing, but Scala codebases that go hard on FP tend not to introduce these, which I appreciate. Pick your poison I guess.