> It's so confusing to build for the BEAM that I ultimately gave up on it.

Every new paradigm is confusing if you don't put in the work to learn it. That's just how the mind works.

What's important is what you get after you don't give up on it long enough. And that, on BEAM, is a hilariously OP superpower of effortlessly[1] parallelizing and distributing workflows. Then there are Elixir macros and the OTP supervision model. The addition of gradual typing is huge, and when the annotation syntax lands, I will definitely switch to Elixir for everything on the backend.

In any case, the only thing I can tell you is that learning Elixir is worth enduring the confusion. From personal experience, it's just a matter of learning it bit by bit over time - there's a finite set of "confusing" ideas in the OTP/Elixir/BEAM mix, and learning about some of them every other day works wonders over a few months.

[1] An exaggeration - I know! But it does make it much easier to implement parallel and distributed workflows. Recently, most of the important languages finally started getting their m-n concurrency models (from Java to Python), so the BEAM is not as much ahead on SMP, but for distribution (you can send closures to execute on different machines transparently!) it is still in a league of its own.