If you're going to try and use this analogy, you need to compare Elixir to Kotlin or Scala or Clojure rather than Java. Elixir is a language written for the BEAM which was created for Erlang. The BEAM happened to be useful VM for these other languages such as Elixir, Gleam, LFE, & Luerl.

For Java you need a JRE and JDK depending on whether you're just running or also building. That they are bundled (for Windows) is slightly convenient, but they're not bundled on Linux so what you're saying is OS dependent

Is your issue something with the runtime itself, or just the difficulty of installing it?

To use Python/Java you have to download and install an OS. (Though some versions might run on bare metal)

Here's what you need for Java:

Download SDKMan/Jenv

Install the version(s) of Java you need for your projects

Make sure your JAVA_HOME environment variable is set

Ensure your IDEs locate the correct Java home

Compared to all that, Elixir's two installers are trivial.

And if you have a competent package manager, you can just tell it to get Elixir and it'll handle Erlang for free.