This will happen if you compile a escript for Erlang/OTP 28 and then attempt to run it on Erlang/OTP 27 and earlier.

Did you nuke deps too? Bc I’ve been switching between 1.18 and 1.19, I recently found a succinct way to delete it all from orbit: mix clean --deps

Edit: Right, _build contains the compiled deps, sorry. I got wires crossed because I had been using ‘mix clean’ and had run into issues with deps on the wrong Elixir version.

searching for the error message I found this commit-message:

This commit changes the atom table in BEAM files to use a variable
length encoding for the length of each atom. For atoms up to 15 bytes,
the length is encoded in one byte. The header for the atom table is
also changed to indicate that new encoding of lengths are used.
Attempting to load a BEAM file compiled with Erlang/OTP 28 in
Erlang/OTP 27 or earlier will result in the following error message:

    1> l(t).
    =ERROR REPORT==== 8-Oct-2024::08:49:01.750424 ===
    beam/beam_load.c(150): Error loading module t:
      corrupt atom table

    {error,badfile}

so maybe an old runtime (27) is used for running the escript?

escripts do not include otp. They expect the system running the escript to have an the otp installation.