Then I guess you just have a weird concept of what 'vapor' is in this context.

I believe you were thinking about so-called "hipster languages".

The language works. It has a full toolchain. It has Erlang interoperability.

If the entire Elixir project and team disappeared tomorrow, I could still write the same software and deploy it to the same (decades-old) BEAM VM.

You should swing by https://elixirforum.com/ and see what's going on in the community. There are a lot of ELixir users who come from Java, OCaml, Haskell, Ruby, C#/F#, and further afield. It's a great language with a really sold niche in building systems with low latency, high availability, and good parallel data processing.