Let's not also forget that lots of projects people are using Phoenix for are APIs (either for mobile apps or single page web applications). Because of that, it makes sense to glue together smaller libs to match your house style for how you want that auth contract to work.
Can confirm. Currently working on several Elixir API apps, they are absolute joy to work on and you get tons of freedom on how exactly to structure them.
The "cruft" from the Phoenix framework is absolutely minimal -- mandatory 4-6 files per project at the most. And they're quite small, too.
