There are many more areas where you simply cannot abort the process on any error that has been triggered. Erlang, being in the niche of network software, can get away with this because you can have mechanism that monitor the process and it's not the end of the world if one process goes down.

Imagine if your Browser crashed every time it hit an error, like a network connection issue, writing to a file, etc...! That just wouldn't be tolerated by consumers of the software.