Erlang's design choices naturally raise errors by default, early; Unix/C tended more to ignoring them. It's true that some faults do kill you, and that when you don't ignore errors, the next simplest handling is to panic. Back when I coded in C I usually wrapped library functions to work that way.

Erlang supports supervision patterns more, though I have little experience there.

"Let it crash" at cell boundaries is also a basic pattern in complex life. I'll bet there's plenty more for programmers to learn about robustness from biology. Doctors and medical researchers too, actually -- they seem too prone to think like "oh here's a kind of damage, guess we have the inside track on this disease now" without understanding it at a level like "here's how the body's self-repair gets overwhelmed".