Other programming languages than Erlang exist for a reason, they're not just fun toy languages for low IQ folks. There are tons of reasons why Erlang may not be a good fit for some project, and one of these other lesser languages would be a better fit, and he doesn't want to work with people who wouldn't even consider something like that.
1. either the person who asked this question doesn't understand that most of the utility in this ecosystem comes from the BEAM VM, the OTP, and the community around them, not just from the Erlang-the-programming-language.
2. or he/she employs the sunk cost fallacy here: I already invested time into learning Erlang and its Prolog-inspired syntax, so "screw Elixir". Disclaimer: I mistakenly avoided learning Elixir for this reason, simply because I already had lots of Erlang/OTP code already written over the years.
But that's not what they said. The statement was literally "to pivot away from erlang". Imagine you are working with, say, python (which I don't really like but it's a popular example) and were forced to switch to Visual Basic.