ok on my pentium G3470 running FreeBSD 12.2:

time /bin/sh -c "echo hi" hi

    real    0m0.003s
    user    0m0.000s
    sys     0m0.003s

time /usr/local/bin/bash -c "echo hi" hi

    real    0m0.006s
    user    0m0.000s
    sys     0m0.006s

time /usr/local/lib/erlang23/bin/erl -eval 'io:format("hi~n"), exit(0)'

Erlang/OTP 23 [erts-11.1] [source] [64-bit] [smp:2:2] [ds:2:2:10] [async-threads:1] [dtrace]

    hi
    {"init terminating in do_boot",0}
    init terminating in do_boot (0)

    Crash dump is being written to: erl_crash.dump...done

    real    0m0.304s
    user    0m0.117s
    sys     0m0.010s

Ok, so 300 ms is clearly too much, but that's running a bunch of stuff.

Turning a bunch of stuff off, I get

time /usr/local/lib/erlang23/bin/erl -eval 'io:format("hi~n"), halt(0, [{flush, false}])' -noshell -start_epmd false -boot no_dot_erlang hi

    real    0m0.077s
    user    0m0.094s
    sys     0m0.008s

(I tried tuning down the number of schedulers, but couldn't get the real time lower)

This is still a lot worse than bash, but about 75 ms is sort of okish. Maybe a non-stock boot file could help. I usually plan for my BEAMs to run for months or years, so I don't worry too much about startup time :)