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As someone who has spent my whole career in somewhat niche things (ROS, OpenWRT, microcontrollers, Nix), I think the answer for how to hire for these is not to look for someone who already has that specific experience but rather look for someone curious, the kind of person who reads wikipedia for fun, an engineer who has good overall taste and is excited to connect the dots between other things they've learned about and experimented with.

Obviously that's not going to give you the benefit of a person who has specifically worked in the ecosystem and knows where the missing stairs are, which does definitely have its own kind of value. But overall, I think a big benefit of working in something like Elixir, Clojure, Rust, etc is that it attracts the kind of senior level people who will jump at the opportunity to work with something different.