You should explicitly state that Spark is written in Scala. Saying it is "native" obscures that. This leads to another advantage of Scala Spark. Scala always has full access to all features. There have been times when some features of Spark aren't accessible in some bindings.

Also, you imply that the speed benefits of Scala are overstated and that obfuscates the decision. I would argue that you repeat the misconception that Python is easier to learn than Scala. I have seen no solid evidence to that effect. Indeed, the only studies that I know that compared Python to other languages (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3159450.3160586 and https://peer.asee.org/programming-learners-struggle-as-much-in-python-as-in-c-or-java) have actual data showing that students learning Python struggle just as much (or more) than those learning Java and C++.

I will also note that Spark is functional. So you use lambdas a lot. Alas, Python's lambdas are really limited because they can only be one expression. Scala works much better as a functional language.