What lower level lang would offer the benefits the beam/otp provide? I suspect you're generalizing a bit too much and haven't thought this through :)
I think most people that dismiss BEAM right off the bat either don’t understand the built-in beam process/supervisor/etc. model with its inherent fault tolerance, etc, or assume its not useful because it doesn’t address their use cases.
That or it’s a evangelist from the church of AI speaking based on faith rather than reason.
Or some combination of the two.