[hocuspocus]

I've onboarded experienced and inexperienced developers to fairly big Scala codebases for the best part of a decade and I can't think of a single time symbolic operators were brought up as a source of complexity of confusion. Sbt deprecated <++= 10 years ago.

[bearforcenine]

Agreed. There was a period of time roughly 10-15 years ago where symbolic operators in Scala were very en vogue. That fell out of style in a big way and I haven't encountered symbol soup in a very long time.

Most of the conversations I have with folks about Scala issues these days center around implicits, tooling, and its decline/lack of popularity.