even years after, the syntax of

companion object

still looks out of place and orthogonal to Kotlin's spirit.

Scala's approach is similar, so I suspect that's what the Kotlin devs are 'copying'. Personally, I really like the separation of object functions from class functions, and don't find I need

companion object

much anyway. Either use top-level functions or Extension functions for most things. But everyone has their own tastes, and things they will adapt to...