I can't refute your personal experience, but 10 years of Erlang work left me longing for more. It sounds as if perhaps Erlang was not used optimally, or, alternatively, best practices may not have been followed.

10 years ago the ecosystem was horrendous, and is much better now. Granted, the build experience could be better but I didn't find it that bad.

I find that people's experiences are relative to what they are accustomed to. Early years for me included compiling and linking C in Windows (segmented) and that was truly horrible!