[pron]

The author of the article you linked is about a decade out of date. "The state of the art in observing your JVM-based applications is a combination of using thread dumps, gc logs, thread activity visualizations." -- that has been untrue for quite some years now. The basic observability offered by the JDK is now the Flight Recorder, a low-overhead in-production tracing and profiling engine that BEAM is many years away from being able to achieve.

The JVM supports all the same runtime observation and manipulation as BEAM. If you want to use them via a shell -- you may. If you want to use the actor model "all the way down" you can do it. The JVM is simply a virtual machine at a lower level than BEAM, but it does provide all the primitives the Erlang model needs.

The reason I'm telling you this is that I think that targeting the JVM would allow Erlang/Elixir to evolve faster -- enjoying the low-level work done by the large OpenJDK team -- as well as reach a wider audience. At the same time, the wider Java platform community will be exposed to all the great ideas that have come out of Erlang. All the necessary foundational work is now, finally (as of JDK 19), in place.