Do you write Scala, or have you even looked at Scala code any time in the past few years? I'm curious where this habit of spreading FUD over Scala being operator heavy came from. Maybe it was back when it first started reaching the HN front-page or something?
Scala is a super approachable language, without any (that I can think of) strange operators in the stdlib. You could make a case for Cats, I guess, but writing purely functional Scala isn't necessary at all, and is something you can approach when or if you feel comfortable to do so.
I'm not the biggest fan of Scala, but for me it's more that it reminds me of Java than the functional constructs.
But pointing at Scalaz is a bit ridiculous. It's a known test library for trying things out and basically not allowed in any Scala codebase I've been working on.
Scalaz is widely used and widely panned. Even though I'm a haskell and purescript programmer that prefers to write <$> and >>=, I find Scala's approach frustrating and hard to read. Especially as type lambdas stack up.
I'm just saying; the impression exists for a reason and the reason is a popular and well-known library.
That's also what makes scala so unapproachable, you get stuff like ++> or =*= that doesn't make any sense.
x + y makes sense to most people
x ^ y not so much