I think the most important thing to understand and to use properly is the concurrency in the problem/solution/system. Using GenServers and other behaviours is just one way of doing the concurrency but it is not the only way. They are tools and like all tools they need to be used in the right way. The problem is to get the right level of concurrency which suites your problem and your solution to that problem. Too much concurrency means you will be doing excess work to no real gain, and too little concurrency means you will be making your system too sequential.
Now, as has been pointed out, many packages like Phoenix already provide a pretty decent level of concurrency which is suitable for many types of applications, at least the ones they were intended for. They will do this automatically so you don’t have to think about it in most cases, but it is still there. Understanding that is necessary so you can work out how much concurrency you need to explicitly add if any. Unfortunately because it is all managed for you “invisibly underneath” many don’t realise that is it there.
