Try out elixir. It runs on the Erlang VM but is easy to get up and running and has a great community. It's much easier to add external libraries and uses its own package manager.
Am I just to assume that Erlang deployment really is as complicated and poorly documented as I thought, since no one suggested any documentation, but three people suggested I switch to Elixir.
Elixir includes Mix - a standard task runner - and Hex as part of the distribution. It also provides a central pkg repository (https://hex.pm/packages). It's much, much easier to start a project and pull all your dependencies.
I guess you could use Hex and Mix with pure Erlang projects, but I haven't tried this.