[lawik]

Gotchas, probably some of those. Both in Elixir and Phoenix. It is an entire language plus an entire web framework.

A lot of people find Elixir more approachable than Erlang. But I wouldn't be surprised if Erlang is technically simpler and as such potentially easier to learn. The syntax is quite foreign to most people coming from more conventional languages while Elixir reads and writes fairly conventionally.

Now Phoenix LiveView does a lot for you, so I wouldn't dismiss the claim of having some magic in there. But once someone starts to get familiar with the stateful approach the model is fairly simple and the "magic" is less mystical. A lot of the things you don't need to pay attention to would be optimizations in markup and templates and how the JS does its job. That's where a bit of magic happens.

Most of the things you mention sound like things about the language. Which I found to be very approachable and the onboarding documentation to be great.