Yes, it is niche but not extremely niche. People either into functional programming or that are part of the JVM ecosystem have at least heard of it. It is one of the big alternative JVM languages with Clojure and Kotlin.
Sure it won't ever overtake Java and Kotlin is eating a bit of its lunch but Tech is not a popularity contest.
Scala was certainly more hyped before (for better or worse). If Scala is what you would call dead then other languages like Haskell, Clojure, Racket, OCaml all must be considered dead as well, which doesn't make much sense.
AFAICT, Scala has basically been replaced by Go for backends and Kotlin (or just plain Java) elsewhere.