Scala can be one of the most productive, elegant, reasonably performant languages to work in or it can be the opposite of all those. When done right it's amazing but the language is complex enough to permit some questionable choices
Elixir looks like the more promising approach. I love its pipe forwarding operator.
The JVM runtime is a runtime. BEAM/OTP/ERTS is a full fledged collection of middleware, libraries, and tools written into/as apart of the Erlang programming language. You can not separate one form the other.