No? I came to Scala from R and Clojure. The point is that Kotlin has pigeonholed itself into being a language for people who can't stand Java. Scala is partially that, but it is also vying for the attention of anybody who does object oriented programming, anybody who does functional programming, anybody that cares about type safety, etc.

The idea that Kotlin is hurting Scala adoption rests on the assumption that the only people who would ever adopt Scala are the people who are trying to get rid of Java.