Curious what you meant about the effect system BS?

I'm assuming they mean Scala doesn't have the tortured Haskell IO monad.

Scala doesn't have an IO monad by default, but ZIO, CatsEffect, and probably others are fairly popular in at least some parts of the community. IMO it's kind of the worst of both worlds (all the complexity, none of the guarantees), but it's definitely there.

Oh. It does. https://github.com/zio/zio

Thankfully, not in the core language :)

This is perhaps why the comment added "Just like Martin Odersky intended it to be!"

There are just too many ways to use Scala, and everyone thinks they're doing it "idiomatically".