Other than learning for fun. Is there enough of a benefit to learning Elixir if you would already consider yourself an expert at PHP/Laravel and JS/Vue ?
At a glance it's hard to see the value or believe that it has the same longevity or $$$ value.
At a glance it's hard to see the value or believe that it has the same longevity or $$$ value.
In terms of $$$ value, it is extremely efficient --including all the "alien" stuff, and that's why it's so cool. An Elixir team will generally create things cheaper to build and operate.
Now, the question is how many Elixir shops you are going to find a job with, but the answer to that depends on the type of career trajectory you are choosing. For example, Rails is not an industry standard by any means if you think in terms of classic IT consulting jobs but has a stronger dev mindshare in startups, so there you go.
Personally, I'm comfortable betting my career on Elixir at the moment. It's too goddamn good to remain a niche language - I expect it to get a lot bigger in the years ahead as more companies and devs fall in love with it. It'll happen slowly, and it's never going to reach the level of saturation that that, say, Javascript has, but I think it has a bright future.
Phoenix and LiveView are a joy to work with, much more so than any previous technology I've used. I haven't yet looked at any of the exciting new ML stuff that's happening in the Elixir world (Nx etc.) but hopefully they'll drive adoption too. I'm never going back to my old ways.
(And of the two, I'm more productive in Phoenix, but I didn't mention that in the comment you're replying to.)
(I think the only way to join the Slack atm is to be manually invited because the signup app got broken by Heroku's pricing changes - but if you email the address in my profile then I'll ask someone to invite you.)