Well in my situation Phoenix is really overkill. I don't build monolithic apps anymore. To me Phoenix felt lake taking Ruby and slapping it on Elixir. It didn't really feel like, "The Elixir Way." So I set out and learned Plug(which is mostly what Phoenix is).

I build all my front ends as stand alone ReactJS apps, so I found it very strange to need Phoenix at all. I started learning to work with OTP & Plug and realized that I can build a json-api spec API in complete Elixir without any phoenix requirements and if I need to add sockets it's very very trivial to do so.

The amount of code needed to make this all work in pure elixir is minimal.

Essentially I just didn't need it for the way I build applications these days.