I wouldn’t dismiss VM languages outright. I’m also not a fan of the Java VM but the two VMs are very much very different. Also Erlang (and it’s VM) were built for telecommunication, and the problems they tried to solve 30 years ago with it are very similar to modern backend engineering problems.
Erlang is in large parts also what allowed WhatsApp to scale to it’s userbase with only 30 engineers.
Between Elixir and Erlang, or between the Java and Erlang VM?
Elixir and Erlang are distinct languages. Here the comparison to the Java VM is apt, in that it’s like Java and Clojure. Different languages, same VM.
If you want an overview on the differences between the VMs then that would be too much for this comment. Here is an article on Erlang Solutions talking about some of them more in depth. If I piqued your curiosity I can also highly recommend this talk from Sasa Yuric. It’s not long and very concisely captures what makes the BEAM so nice to use.