The software industry is for sure not the
only industry where people confuse the quality of their tools for the quality of the job, and go looking for nails that match their preferred hammer instead of focusing on doing a good job of the task at hand.
However it might be one of the only professions where this tool-obsession is so valorized and where there's a whole subculture of it, and where it proliferates at such a high rate. There are people who've made half their career out of chasing the technology of the month or advising that a rewrite in language/framework/technique will solve all problems.
It's of course natural because we talk about the tech industry, and so people become focused on the technology rather than its application to human problems, or see all problems as a technology choice issue rather than a issue of implementing business logic with technology choices... So it depends on the discipline of the engineer how deep down that rabbit hole people go, and the quality of management about how well they can keep their staff focused on the problem domain first, and tools second.
All this to say: I've been that engineer, I've also suffered from those engineers, and because of that I'm now careful. I think Erlang is great. And my career now is Rust. But I hope I'm wise enough to recognize that how harmful rewrite in X and if only this was built in X can be to customers' projects and budgets.
Not to say the original-comment was that person, or that the person sneering about the Erlang was right, but I do understand where the wariness comes from.
All that said, I have more fear of the proliferation of novel JS frameworks than I do of stuff like Erlang or Lisp. And Java is another place where esp in the early days the proliferation of frameworks-as-solutions was a real problem.