A better title might be: "Nerves 1 released! Create bulletproof embedded software running on the Erlang VM"
Add that with BEAM’s first class services & supervision trees via OTP and you can easily setup multiple “microservices” which can be developed independently but communicate without needing to setup IPC. So no need to deal with systemd or dubs or any of that. Mix (the Elixir dependency manager) is one of the best package management tools I’ve used, and in Nerves it becomes the “package manager” of sorts of the system (though you can use buildroot packages as well for non beam code).
In practical terms it’s pretty easy to grab an RPi, and make a project, set internet settings, do remote updates, etc.