I still don't know what gleam is for tbh. I like it conceptually. But interop with for instance elixir libraries is not as seamless as you'd like.

It's a general purpose programming language, like OCaml, Python, or Scheme. It's not intended for any specific business domain.

I use it mostly for web APIs / services, it's great for that!

Interop is not seamless since Elixir does not have the same static type system, but it is possible and that does help sometimes. When resizing images for example, I fall back to Elixir's bindings to libvips. I've also used Oban from Gleam in the past.