The notion that Erlang is bizarre but Scala isn't is a particularly intriguing notion...but that's a different rant.
I suppose the concurrency model of Erlang is a departure from The Way Things Are, but I'd argue that's a good thing. The JVM doesn't offer much fundamentally different in terms of the concurrency model than Ruby and Python. It certainly performs orders of magnitudes better, but it's still subject to a lot of the same issues: you have a pool of threads running your http service, and when you exhaust that pool then you have outages. And stopping the world for GC is enormously problematic. Erlang takes care of all that in an extremely elegant way.
Also it doesn't take minutes (!!!) to compile an Elixir (or Erlang) program. Developer happiness is often overlooked (Scala being the worst offender in my experience) and Elixir really hits that out of the park.
I've been comparing Erlang, Elixir, and Scala lately, and Scala seems to have both a nicer syntax and a nicer feature set than the former two.
Scala is definitely C++-esque in being a bloated language. And it lets developers commit utter horrors. But if you stay away from those horrors (mostly new operators and DSLs) and don't use them yourself, it seems like a very nice and elegant language. You get the same functional programming and actor concurrency you would get form Erlang and Elixir.
I suppose the concurrency model of Erlang is a departure from The Way Things Are, but I'd argue that's a good thing. The JVM doesn't offer much fundamentally different in terms of the concurrency model than Ruby and Python. It certainly performs orders of magnitudes better, but it's still subject to a lot of the same issues: you have a pool of threads running your http service, and when you exhaust that pool then you have outages. And stopping the world for GC is enormously problematic. Erlang takes care of all that in an extremely elegant way.
Also it doesn't take minutes (!!!) to compile an Elixir (or Erlang) program. Developer happiness is often overlooked (Scala being the worst offender in my experience) and Elixir really hits that out of the park.