To me learning Elixir felt like a two stage process: learning the language and learning the OTP.

The language itself is pretty small and I felt like the first stage was pretty easy.

Learning the OTP is a much bigger challenge.

At the same time, I think you can gain a lot of the benefits of Elixir and the BEAM without needing to be an OTP expert, because frameworks like Phoenix leverage it for you.

In my experience, things like pattern matching and immutable data really contribute to a more maintainable code base, whether you find you need the actor model or not.