I actually agree with every pain point that Dave Thomas described in his talk[1] and is outlined in the Component github repo[2]. Sadly, it's unclear to me if anyone else is as passionate and willing to continue the effort. Nonetheless, it put to words exactly what I hated about genservers and such.
I loved his complaints about genservers (and his complaints about nomenclature), and it made me settle on my own genserver structure. I think the hard thing about dave thomas' component is that it just doesn't have enough buyin in the community to make it "its own thing". I wish it did though. But on the other hand, if elixir had diverged too much from erlang it would have made people angry...
It's unfortunate. Because when fresh eyes take a look at Elixir, it's hard to miss that the whole genserver pattern feels like a workaround / anti-pattern.
I remember thinking, "This feels messy..." but not really knowing why. And I was brand new and barely a developer!
But I think you nailed it. It's because of the Erlang continuity.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U7cLUygMeI
[2]: https://github.com/pragdave/component