it mainly depends on what you do with ruby, if its web development, you might wanna stay in Ruby, but for some specific services Elixir might be a good shot.

But overall you need to learn what you think will be good for your set of skills.

Learning any new language is generally beneficial. And the farther in terms of paradigm it is from your current languages, the better. However, it's not mandatory and you should only do it if you want.

And Elixir is not a "Ruby on steroids". It's a different language with different practices and different ecosystem. This is an old blog post of mine, but it still stands.

Well, what kind of annoying trouble do you get with Ruby? One of the things I'm learning right now is Ecto. A library that handles database communication. I don't know Ruby, but as far as I know Ruby has Active Records. Active Records hides a lot of things so it's implicit. Ecto is explicit and has some interesting ways to handle lots of pain points. There's a book called Programming Ecto that goes more in depth.

In general, I'd say that Elixir is a very pragmatic language. No wonder, it's based on Erlang which was designed to be used in production under heavy load of telephone communications.

It's also a growing language with a strong community.

Another questions. Do you want to approach Elixir as a serious endeavor? Why not just dabble with it? Why not just play with it? Does one need convincing to play?

I think your own experience is way more important than words of other people.

As an outsider, I would approach the topic with this question: what is my favorite ORM across all languages? Then I would consider the language and ecosystem around that ORM. This may or may not land you at Elixir.

Two words: Pattern Match.
It kind of blew my mind, coming from a Python/JS background, just how many things can be done using pattern match on elixir. It has been geniuenly a game changer to my coding style, and how to build solutions.