It's still copied but if you are using an ets table you're likely only copying a small subset of the data per query instead of schlepping the whole index every time.

It’s still copied, but a process can quickly become a bottleneck in parallel code (every request to a process is sequential).

An ETS table can be concurrently read (and tweaked even further for that use case if desired).

Like eproxus mentioned, it's still been shared through normal process messaging but improvements will be made regarding this.