A lot of that is going away with better LSP support and better LLM suggestions.
But elixir and LiveView are generally great (I LOVE ecto), but building component frameworks and component communication still feels a bit janky.
I've actually found a bit of a resurgence in productivity with React on the front-end and Elixir/Absinthe/Ash Framework on the backend. With GraphQL I get fully typed queries, and Ash Framework on the Elixir side helps a ton with removing the boiler plate of code required for GraphQL, since Ash (mostly) generates the schema for me. A bit of a learning curve with Ash, but now that it's clicked, I feel more productive than I did with just Ecto/Contexts/LiveView.
https://www.ash-hq.org - there's a recent PragProg book on it that really helped it click for me.
Ecto though, I could never figure out how to use. If I could just make SQL queries in an ORM-style I would understand it, but the repositories and auto generated relations and such I couldn't figure out. Do you have any good resources for learning ecto? I didn't find the official docs helpful.