Totally agree. I've been in this industry since 2001 and never, ever had a performance problem which couldn't be solved with just thinking what your code is actually doing. The bottleneck has been always the database, or the network, etc. The only problem I've had with threaded languages is running out of threads/processes due to making external API network requests, etc, but you learn to not block threads by using jobs, etc. And worst case, more hardware has been always cheaper than more developers due to less productive languages (hello Go! :wink: :wink:).
Performance is one thing. I think another major benefit people cite for using Elixir/functional programming in general is the productivity aspect. Of course you may argue that this is easily outweighed by hiring pains as a company grows. Just wanted to mention that from a pure language/developer perspective, I'd much prefer to work with Elixir than something like Java or even Go.
I fully agree with you, but the demographics in HN is special -- you may be talking to people who work at Google-scale :P
Anyway I believe you really need a very special case to make Elixir shine. Obviously you can build whatever you want with it, and it's really nice, but if you are doing consulting you are going on for a hard sell. And startups will sooner or later feel the crunch of more expensive and/or difficult hiring.
You are not Google.