They are indeed faster, and my first attempt with atomics was extremely fast, I only saw the issues when I had to push harder for correctness and extreme concurrency where my pool ended up allowing multiple processes to use the same connection at the same time.
So I had to lean into the BEAM for correctness which also reduced cache misses, I could properly have kept the original design and just built a queue, but it got to a place where I had to trade simplicity vs complexity.
All that being said, I want to see more of this, since we can get bare metal performance on the BEAM without writing low level code.
