It's not just jobs, by any metric you can think of Elixir is an obscure tech, if you want I will add sources to this claim but hopefully we can agree.
- https://appunite.com/blog/top-10-elixir-companies-to-follow
If all that's true, it's a natural consequence that better tools will have fewer job postings: you need fewer people to get the job done, and the ones you've got have really good retention. However, so will tools on the other side of the bell curve: nobody in their right mind wants to go there, either on the supply or demand side. So all popularity really tells you is where the enterprise hype machine was, five, ten, fifteen years ago such that "nobody got fired for choosing X" and "learn X! It's got a lot of job postings!" still align.
But the enterprise hype machine is optimised for tools that have a very specific set of surface criteria: enormous libraries so you're not inventing anything, rock-solid vendor support so there are people being paid to evangelise it into orgs (or, like JS, are ubiquitous anyway, but I think that particular lightning only strikes once), and "easy to learn" ergonomics such that developers asymptote towards replaceable cogs in both quality and quantity.
"Well respected but obscure" describes a certain sort of success, by that reasoning. It just needs enough of a community to stay alive, and that's a bit more of a toss-up. Ruby haemorrhaged people in the Rails 4-5-6 cycle as people jumped ship to node, but Rails 7 and Ruby 3 are looking extremely tasty despite that, and I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a bit of a resurgence in popularity over the next couple of years outside big enterprises.
Most of the people I interview have got into tech after Rails 3 was released, and generally aren't aware of why the Rails/Phoenix/Django concept was such a breath of fresh air. I think what you'll see is that the reason Phoenix and Elixir have a "next big thing" isn't technical factors at all. It'll be a rediscovery by the new generation when someone unexpected goes unicorn and the story is "it was all down to Phoenix", even when the real factors were elsewhere.
> there's little jobs that's all
wasn't an issue for me. I applied for five elixir jobs in a limited sector (fintech) and got an offer.
You probably haven't heard of klarna, or discord, either.
About Discord see my other comment - I don't think Elixir is their main language.
> From day one, Discord has used Elixir as the backbone of its chat infrastructure.
https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/what-i...
> Another is a re-architecture of our guilds service, which as our biggest communities have grown, started struggling to handle 100,000 connected sessions per Elixir process. We horizontally scaled the Elixir processes so that we can scale as the number of connected sessions increases... Many of our stateful services that maintain connections to clients, and process and distribute messages in real-time, are written in Elixir, which is well suited to the real-time message passing workload. But in recent years we have run up against some scaling limitations. Discord has written and open-sourced several libraries that ease some pains we’ve encountered with managing a large, distributed Elixir system with hundreds of servers
It's such a better platform than Ruby and Rails that I won't bother writing about it here - there are already hundreds of blog posts about it. Productivity is at least on par with Ruby (I believe better) and performance on another plane of existence.