My budget does not run to people who can write or maintain Elixir.

What do you mean by budget?

Cash. I can't even afford to hire people who are moderately competent because FAANGs keep herding them away.

One perspective is you can get more done in Elixir with less people, at least that's been my experience vs say Rails + React.

That would be fine if I could hire one person, which I can't.

Also, we shot ourselves historically with Scala which had the same promises.

This has been my experience too.

Is it in terms of hiring? Try posting a fake but real sounding job in the Elixir Slack group. You will get a ton of interest from people dying to use Elixir professionally.

Yeah anecdotally I see tons of developers who are looking for Elixir work. How can a language simultaneously be hard to hire for _and_ hard to get hired in?