How is it irrelevant? Operating a single node would be $10k+ per year. That makes no sense for a large corporation to adopt. They’re better off rewriting the entirety of Akka.

$2k once per year is irrelevant for enterprise, but not $2k per core. With bigger deployments that's more than the entire dev team's salaries.

Lets say a 16 core machine costs 20k with associated costs (share of router, etc). This is a pretty high price for a machine, but isn't entirely insane.

Your akka license now costs €32k per year. Meanwhile if you are doing standard five year deprecation your 16 core machine is 4k. This means you are paying 8x the cost of the machine itself for the software license. An important software license but not one that is a full complete piece of work.

I could understand paying this much for software like Wowza where it is a "complete" solution for a problem. Where you are buying a full piece of software, but not a developer framework.