Kotlin may be more popular, but not much. It's nowhere near the mainstream languages like Java, Python, JavaScript, C# or PHP. Not even close to TypeScript.
Kotlin's popularity plummets once you leave out android development, though. Same with Obj-c/Swift for Mac/iOS development.
5-8 years ago Scala had a large boost in data science/big data work as it was either it or Python for a lot of frameworks like Spark. We used Scala because we wanted static typing and threading (among other things) for our workloads.
Huh, fair enough. Maybe my spheres are much more Kotlin-focused and I was projecting too much.
That said, probably "number of Github projects" and/or "number of StackOverflow tags" doesn't encapsulate the sheer amount of code written in Kotlin for Android apps, which is where my head was probably at.
5-8 years ago Scala had a large boost in data science/big data work as it was either it or Python for a lot of frameworks like Spark. We used Scala because we wanted static typing and threading (among other things) for our workloads.