It prevents unnecessarily moving data around. And if you're running the whole stack on the same server with Sideqik you're dealing with interrupts and memory copies between processes; in Elixir it's all within the same allocated memory and nothing gets copied. Plus it's another service you don't have to monitor because it's automatically monitored by BEAM.
Oban will let you choose which servers the jobs can execute on, and you could do the same with your own app code
> Queue Control — Queues can be started, stopped, paused, resumed and scaled independently at runtime locally or across all running nodes (even in environments like Heroku, without distributed Erlang).
I think it's nice that you can run everything in the same server. If you're scaling, and want to split everything up, that's a "nice problem to have", but it's convenient if you can just run everything in the same application/codebase when you're getting started.
I do agree with you that's not a huge win compared with Rails, but it is nice to have. I think you'd have to look more at something like "lots of concurrent, long-lived connections" for the real wins over Rails for the BEAM ecosystem. I mean, you can do that in Ruby if you want to, but it's going to be cleaner and simpler with Elixir/Erlang.