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People have been trying for, IIRC, 15+ years to add a full-fledged type system to Erlang, and the distributed nature keeps defeating them. This problem may never be solved.

At some point, I think it has to be accepted in the same way that we accept that REST APIs aren’t typed.

See Akka Typed (based on the Actor model) for an example of typed message passing in a distributed system.

Not sure what compromises were made, but it was a sore point for users of the library for years to throw around untyped messages when the host language (Scala) provided such a powerful type system.

Akka Typed is not capable of expressing everything Erlang's OTP commonly does I'm afraid, so it's not a complete solution here.

We do however have typed message passing libraries in Gleam that are in part inspired by Akka Typed.

It does have message passing, just implemented as a library rather then as a core language feature.

There seems to be some work on that here: https://github.com/gleam-experiments/otp_process