Perhaps you should give Nix a try :)
On my relatively powerful workstation, Erlang/BEAM takes about 7 minutes to compile.
We're working around this currently by having a fat devcontainer image, pre-built with Erlang inside (from source) by our CI. It chews through CI minutes unavoidably due to how docker layer caching works.
It would be awesome to just download and unpack a tarball, regardless of which distro you're using.
As long as the specific version of Erlang you’re using is present in either your Nix store or the global cache for your OS and arch (at cache.nixos.org), you should not need to compile anything.
And if you rely on custom builds, you can just setup your own binary cache. This is similar to remote caching in Bazel.
Some more details on Nix caching here: https://zero-to-nix.com/concepts/caching/
https://www.cachix.org/ simplifies running a custom cache. Well worth the money, IMO.
That said, learning nix and setting up a nix cache is still a lot of work. Docker buildx might offer you some more knobs to cache portions of your build in a finer-grained manner without having to take the nix plunge.
I get that if you've gone through the pain of learning it you get a system with some very nice properties. But casually suggesting "maybe try nix" is a bit like telling someone who wants to listen to Mozart "maybe try playing a piano".
In any case 'nix-shell -p erlang|elixir' does not seem too complicated to me.
> If you want to control the exact version that's being used across your team (via `asdf` or similar), this practically means you'll end up compiling the BEAM over and over...
So I think it is perfectly appropriate to suggest a sharp tool.