I will agree that Elixir has better tooling around building and releasing code.
However, in terms of barrier to entry for developing in, I actually think Erlang's is lower. People tout Elixir for its syntax being similar to other languages, but that's a detriment, not a benefit. Erlang and Elixir, both, require you thinking in a way most other languages don't. With Elixir, and the language looking familiar, you're tempted to try and shoehorn your existing knowledge, practices, etc, into an Elixir shaped package, and that leads to less idiomatic code, more surprises in how things actually work, and sometimes even more brittle applications than how they ~should~ be (though having a decent supervision tree means they'll probably still be better than what you'd have had in those other languages). Using Erlang, though, you relearn from scratch. It's a small language and that syntax isn't really a huge barrier; being forced to code in a language that shares so little with what you're experienced with means you're likely open to new paradigms, and will pick them up instead of trying to reuse your existing ones.
At least, that was my experience with Erlang, compared with Scala/Akka (which I tried first, and ended up with a lot of OO, non-functional, non-parallel code).
I had a similar experience with both Erlang and XSLT -- they don't look anything like a typical imperative language, so I wasn't tempted to think in imperative terms. I just had to do things "the Erlang way" and "the (crazy) XLST way."
However, in terms of barrier to entry for developing in, I actually think Erlang's is lower. People tout Elixir for its syntax being similar to other languages, but that's a detriment, not a benefit. Erlang and Elixir, both, require you thinking in a way most other languages don't. With Elixir, and the language looking familiar, you're tempted to try and shoehorn your existing knowledge, practices, etc, into an Elixir shaped package, and that leads to less idiomatic code, more surprises in how things actually work, and sometimes even more brittle applications than how they ~should~ be (though having a decent supervision tree means they'll probably still be better than what you'd have had in those other languages). Using Erlang, though, you relearn from scratch. It's a small language and that syntax isn't really a huge barrier; being forced to code in a language that shares so little with what you're experienced with means you're likely open to new paradigms, and will pick them up instead of trying to reuse your existing ones.
At least, that was my experience with Erlang, compared with Scala/Akka (which I tried first, and ended up with a lot of OO, non-functional, non-parallel code).