I would really appreciate any data that backs this up. Or is this a personal observation written as if it was a consensus? Because if we are going by personal experiences, the community definitely feels bigger and more active than before to me.
Now you may say Stackoverflow isn't a good measurement. In Tiobe Elixir hasn't made it to the top 50 https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
There is little reason for me to believe Elixir is before it's peak, the data is showing otherwise. Elixir's contemporaries (Rust / Go / Kotlin) are at a totally different place usage wise. So I tend to think this is it for Elixir, it's all down hill from here. If you have data showing otherwise please let me know.
Up until 2017 or so, you could see the Elixir community active on StackOverflow with answers from José, Chris and most maintainers. Then the community collectively moved to Elixir Forum. Wouldn’t you prefer to ask questions where the maintainers can also answer? Per the Elixir Forum stats, the number of active users keep growing.
I won’t comment on TIOBE because you can find plenty of critique elsewhere. For example, in the Redmonk rank, Elixir does fairly well on the GitHub axis, and is ahead of contemporaries like Clojure and Julia, and ahead of other functional languages like Haskell, Ocaml, Erlang, and even F#.
I strongly believe Elixir is before its peak. Elixir is most likely still growing, just not at the same pace as languages like Rust or Kotlin.
It's funny because not only is popularity not a good indicator of the quality/utility of a tool, if it is overpopular it can actually hurt things
1. They don't even bother advertising a position in local geographical "general" job boards. (Job postings on LinkedIn cost money for every day you have them up; they're a waste of resources if you can predict with high confidence that nobody will find the role through there.) Instead, they'll advertise globally but targeted to the language's community (i.e. language-specific job boards, forums and chat groups, newsletters, etc.) This is where the people using the language are looking, too, anyway, because they also know that there are too few local opportunities for it to make sense to invest the time in checking local job-boards for a job matching their skillset.
2. They don't bother hiring for the language. Instead, they hire for "experience with [relevant language paradigms]" and "experience with any of [similar, more-popular languages]" and then expect the new hire to learn the language on the job.
My personal job-criterion for hiring Elixir devs is "a polyglot in several different language paradigms, fluent in at least one functional language." I find that that filter actually predicts better whether they'll be a good Elixir dev, than actual experience using Elixir does.
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As an aside, there's also the fact that languages like Erlang/Elixir (or the MLs, or the Lisps, or Prolog, or...) tend not to be languages used for everything in a company, but instead tend to be languages used for the secret sauce core component of a company. A lot of the time, companies don't talk about using these languages, even though they do, because they consider them a competitive advantage over their rivals in whatever niche they occupy.
Heroku is an obvious example: much of their architecture was written in Erlang [nearly everything at first], but they never advertised that fact once in any official capacity. Likewise, HFT firms never mention they're using ML or Prolog, but many do, because trading bots are often just souped-up expert systems. The only time you find these things out, is when having a beer with ex-engineers from those companies.
There are a lot of happy devs who can find Elixir work, it depends a lot on location, past experience etc. I do think the number of jobs advertised is fairly low compared to demand. SO on one hand it could lead to high salaries. On the other hand it could lead to not all people landing a job (which if you look at the comments some people here are complaining about).
