[Communitivity]

I am dubious it's the performance of Erlang that's the albatross, considering the performance of RabbitMQ messaging system and Process One's XMPP server ejabberd. However, at the end of the day Erlang is a VM language, so I'd think it's not going to be as fast in many cases as Rust. Performance in a distributed system is good, because of the design, but that's still not the #1 priority of Erlang. I think Erlang's #1 priority is robustness.

Then what is the albatross?

I think it is complexity. Erlang, and OTP, is not simple to understand. There are a lot of footguns. It is beautifully designed and fit for purpose, given it's history and heritage. However, the learning time for creating a real app in Erlang is high. To flip it around, I think the reason Ruby caught on so fast was that it was so easy to learn Rails and create a web app with it.

You could perhaps convert Elixir to be based on top of Rust, but there are many concepts that don't map, or don't map well.