(Upvoted for a really relevant and valuable refinement to the thread.)

Admittedly that layer is almost always abstracted i.e. AWS / GCP and various other smaller hosted solutions that handle a good chunk of load balancing for us. In that landscape BEAM VM's strengths shine even brighter. I've seen firsthand that you can in fact bring a BEAM VM to its knees if you expose it just like that to the net. It's not pretty. Golang fares a touch better and Rust seems almost immune (provided one does not screw up their caching layer and don't do elementary N+1 query mistakes).