I'm not familiar with akka, but I do see BEAM (the Erlang VM utilized by Elixir as well) as an alternative to docker swarm/kubernetes.
It requires stack homogeny of BEAM languages, but you can run distributed, concurrent, parallelized code with live debugging tools and "hot code reloading". I feel like the author's point is that docker and friends enable tools not meant for distributed/concurrent/parallel to be deployed in such a way. I could be mistaken and would be curious what you think of that argument.
I'm inclined to agree with the point in as much as docker can permit forcing a square peg into a round hole. On the other hand, being able to develop on *nix and deploy to weird editions of windows 10 had made me deeply appreciate docker.