The OTP package is not built-in because that would prevent Gleam being compiled to other targets, namely Javascript. This is a big draw for the language, and it's worth pulling out BEAM-specific stuff into packages for this reason.

I think Louis and the Gleam community are very serious about supporting OTP, but there are still open research questions around typing parts of OTP.

The parts of OTP that Gleam supports are still very useful, compatible with Erlang/Elixir, and very much used. And they have the benefit of being statically typed [1].

There's no embarrasement about Gleam's primary runtime being the BEAM, it's right there on the front page, above the fold! [2]

[1] https://github.com/bcpeinhardt/learn_otp_with_gleam [2] https://gleam.run/