Fringe tech is usually a secret weapon in consulting, or, more rarely (but still happening quite a bit), in a full-time job.

Apples to oranges.

Erlang existed for 30 years and has been used by its small-ish but also very vibrant community, with great success.

So you know, very popular or not, us the people who use it successfully commercially will keep doing so.

But as I have said in the past, if Rust (or OCaml, or any statically strongly typed language that compiles to native code) gains all the guarantees of the BEAM VM then I'll abandon Elixir the next day.