No downvotes from me btw, but I think the author and just about most people using Elixir (which tends to not be a first language for most in the community) have

No downvotes from me btw, but I think the author and just about most people using Elixir (which tends to not be a first language for most in the community) have used the classic-style of temporary variables for lack of any other option. Certainly in my own experience the pipe operator has eliminated those redundant expressions rendering the code more concise, expressive, and hence more readable. Many APIs in other languages emulate something similar with method chaining for this very reason (see Fluent APIs). Extracting variables out of if-expressions can still be useful for improving readability of long boolean expressions though.