Never really played with the Erlang VM other than a little more than the Hello World in Elixir, but when I'm in the debugging hell of Apache Spark I really wish it wasn't based on the JVM.
That's flat out false. Only the syntax is taken from Ruby, that's it. Even the added metaprogramming isn't anything like Ruby's. It otherwise just like Erlang.
Other than that if you look at how the language works under the surface it is completely different from Ruby which uses Runtime Reflection to add methods to objects in memory.