That sort of problem is beyond the scope of the runtime in any case, isn't it? In either of the examples you offered (holding a lock, coordinating with other processes), there must be timeouts enforced by the lock or the other processes so that, if something goes wrong, the system isn't waiting for a crashed process to continue the work.

Erlang/Elixir do make this pretty easy to manage, including the scenario where the process does recover by reverting back to a known good state. It won't do it for you automatically, but it exposes enough surface area to make problems like that solvable without reaching for a lot of extra tools - it's built into the runtime.