I believe BEAM bytecode is now JIT-ed.

EDIT: It is, since OTP 24 was released in 2021:

https://www.erlang.org/downloads/24

> The BeamAsm JIT-compiler has been added to Erlang/OTP and will give a significant performance boost for many applications. The JIT-compiler is enabled by default on most x86 64-bit platforms that have a C++ compiler that can compile C++17.

elixir/erlang gets compiled into beam byte code. It's a vm. why does this matter..

It's an interpreted byte code run (interpreted) by BEAM. Not a native binary run by CPU.

But apparently BeamAsm JIT solves the issue? As mentioned in the sibling comment.

But why does a particular execution model matter?

Raw performance.

What about https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/beamasm.html