I guess this is similar to me going to a wine store. I am readily persuaded that a good 20 euro wine is actually much more enjoyable for me than a 5 euro wine.

I guess this is similar to me going to a wine store. I am readily persuaded that a good 20 euro wine is actually much more enjoyable for me than a 5 euro wine. But I get no additional enjoyment from 500 euro wine over that 20 euro wine. So it depends where you are looking from. If you are a ruby shop and your regular out of the box latency is in the hundreds of milliseconds which under load falls apart into at first some and then all taking seconds or tens of seconds then the BEAM is fantastic, you go down to single-double digit responses and under load the latencies start to grow but very gradually. Every request gets more or less same latency. When you come from microsecond latencies then it looks like the BEAM is doing a lot but is mostly in your way in achieving the lowest latency possible. Completely different problem sets which gets confused by the writer not giving the necessary context for their claim. In the Nerves/IoT/HW space one pattern used is to use Elixir for all the soft-realtime stuff and enjoy the QoL and other benefits of the BEAM and use other tools more suitable for hard-realtime tasks.