I’ve written a lot of Erlang/Elixir, basing the stack for my last startup on it. I wouldn’t change that decision, but you are completely right on people not getting it. I way overestimated the capacity for even well educated devs with computer science degrees to pick it up.

There were other factors, but largely it came down to whether they were exposed to something like scheme before the typical java education. Outside of that it was only people who had a deep understanding of the actor model that could get it.