Thankfully, Jose appreciates performance and engineering more too, traits the Rails community was as keen about.
Jose has really thread a needle with Elixir I feel.
Rails has a strong reputation for productivity, it doesn't have the strongest reputation for long-term maintainability (though it can certainly be maintained). Or that's what I hear from the ex-Ruby devs in Elixir. I came via Python and I'd say the same of Django.
There was kind of something in the zeitgeist ready for this... This was a video by Gary Bernhardt in 2012 (that's like, Elixir -2 years?). I've queued it up to where he talks about basically wanting to go live on a cruise ship, fork rubinius, and rebuild ruby on top of erlang. The main chunk of the talk is about the software pattern that Phoenix and Elixir really tries to get you to adopt.
The rails team itself did a lot of work to improve performance.
Rails core teams even spent considerable time working on MRI to improve performance.
Thousands of libraries devoted to this very topic just for Rails.
I mean, you're not even right.