The point I was trying to make is that it does not have to be cryptic at all!
I worked on a play app where it was really easy to go around and even JS front-end developers made small contributions.
Maybe some teams need to set up rules, or do more code reviews idk.
Actually not true. If you love making software you will probably use Scala without its esoteric features (for the better, imho) and you have a powerful and useful tool, yet very pleasant to work with.
the sbt config has been the worth part for me. I could never fully understand the syntax (or let say API because it's scala, but really those operators ...).
Good points! It always seems easy to start with a SPA for a small app but I noticed that it can be quite hard to maintain if the app is not super actively developed. Even if the code is simple you usually have a lot of dependencies, not always well maintained themselves, and upgrading is hard.
I have the same issue for some of the libraries. I'm just starting with TS so it can be user error.
However, I found that you can download the typings in the IDE in Settings/Javascripts/Libraries and download...
This is tedious to have to do this though.
Note: doing this works with normal JS as well which is pretty cool.