I’ve not listened to the podcast, but I see two point in terms of elixir and serverless technology:
For orchestration: I guess it’s because of existing knowledge in other languages in teams building those systems. Also the beam doesn’t really have a straight forward story for executing user-code within the vm, so it’s going to need a technology mix anyways.
As the executed runtime: The beam is not the best vm to be started up for a single task and stopped right afterwards.
I guess the beam excels at “self hosted serverless”, when you can deploy your own trusted code to be run.