Did you use live view for those projects? If so, what sort of scale are they? I've been seriously considering learning Elixir+Phoenix, but don't whether live view is suitable for serious projects (where serious blog project ∉ serious projects).
Seems like most of their issues would not apply to a greenfield project and now that things are stable, they're quite happy with the choice.
Traffic estimate: https://www.similarweb.com/website/cars.com/#overview
If people build multi-billion dollar companies on top of PHP and Node.js, I would not even be concerned about scaling Phoenix.