Yap some patches or suggestions made it in and the greater community benefited. Some lock contention points removed, memory management stuff etc.
Also remember this is just one visible project. Erlang VM is being developed actively and many other companies and people are contributing. For an almost 30 year old language it very active. Maps are coming in R17 so are dirty schedulers, {active,N} on sockets, lots of goodies.
This was more my being agog at the author viewing the work that was done to the BEAM as evidence -against- Erlang being great, rather than the fact that these people with that level of experience stayed with it, and still raved about it, as evidence in Erlang's favor. And that the issues they encountered are probably fixed any way, or apply only to their use case (and so may still exist, but have a tradeoff that is worth keeping in other use cases).
Also remember this is just one visible project. Erlang VM is being developed actively and many other companies and people are contributing. For an almost 30 year old language it very active. Maps are coming in R17 so are dirty schedulers, {active,N} on sockets, lots of goodies.