I think this is an important note to make. You mentioned you have a decade’s worth of experience using the BEAM. This puts you into the same category as Jose himself, or someone who is at the extreme end of being super proficient and capable of writing pretty much anything you want without too much of a headache.
As someone who doesn’t have that type of experience, your few days of coding a custom client becomes an impossible hurdle to cross or involves asking for help from external sources and potentially never reaching a solution. When this happens multiple times during a project on every corner, that’s when you think about dropping out of the language.
It’s very much a deterrent when you want to integrate with something (such as Stripe) and seeing an officially supported library for Python, Ruby, Node, PHP, Go, .NET and Java but no Elixir. Almost every service I want to integrate with doesn’t have an Elixir client.
Also seeing libraries like ex_aws stop being maintained because the sole author who maintains it doesn’t use AWS anymore is a bummer. The forum post was around for months with an ask for help to find a new maintainer but no one replied, so now one of the most popular back-ends for storing file uploads becomes a problem you need to solve as an individual developer.
In a lot of cases, to develop a web app you’re on the hook for having to become a library creator instead of an application developer just to begin your project. Some folks might want that, but it’s not exactly a productive environment where the goal is to go from no app to launching an app.
