Pure and deterministic algorithms can have the luxury of having much more strict and concrete error handling strategies.
On the other hand, "promptly handling errors" sounds naive for large distributed systems where almost every call can fail for reasons unknown. Experience has already shown that exactly the opposite approach - just panic and restart the "service" (process in Erlang terms, but it's got nothing to do with Unix processes and is far more granular) can build extremely reliable systems. In conventional programming languages, that roughly corresponds to adding top-mid-level error boundaries (exception/panic handlers) at critical junctures.
But perhaps that's what you mean by "error bubbling nests shallowly"? No idea, since it's not exactly clear.