What is it specifically about the BEAM VM that positions it above, say, Go on K8S?

Not having to learn K8s

Ability to manage tens of thousands of stateful connections without the 95th percentile requests jumping to 5 seconds.

Just to start with.

I get the appeal, but without strong typing it's a no-go in my book. Get me an elixir with proper types and we can talk.

I believe they have already started this effort. https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2023/06/22/type-system-updates-...

They have but it's mostly a labor of love and it's very difficult to fit a static type system into a dynamically typed language.

We already have some false positives. Happily the team is very motivated and is grinding away at them, for which we the community are forever grateful.

Oh I agree. The Erlang/Elixir ecosystem is in danger of Rust inventing a BEAM-like runtime and making it irrelevant.

Elixir is Lisp with sprinkles on top

Lisp for people who hate parentheses.

No, it's LISP for people who understand multicore CPUs exist for a long time now.

Modern LISP dialect authors still believe threads are a super clever idea which is just... /facepalm.