I, too, am empathetic of needing to pay for rent, food etc., and Akka has always been basically too good to be true/free, but there's no chance we can continue to use it at $DAYJOB like this. We had a difficult standing with it already, because lawd forbid, we weren't building run-off-the-mill CRUD applications in the lowest-common-denominator technology.

It was also basically our argument for using Scala. Scala is excellent. Simpler and more mature than Kotlin. But Kotlin won the popularity contest, so again lawd forbid, someone might have to spend two days reading up on the syntax differences. Basically, because management is scared of programming languages.
With Akka, you had a framework that had a significantly more usable and documented Scala API. For Kotlin, you had to adapt the Java API, which is far more complex and that adaptation is not documented.

So, yeah, we kind of don't have an exit strategy here. Basically having to hope for a fork to magically appear, so we can continue freeloading off of that. Don't have much of a choice here, unfortunately.