> they don’t actually get you out of having to handle errors

I wrote a durable system that recovers from all sorts of errors (mostly network faults) without writing much error handling code. It just retries automatically, and importantly the happy path and the error path are exactly the same, so I don’t have to worry that my error path has much less execution than my happy path.

> but the part of that transaction that failed was “charging the customer” - did it fail before or after the charge went through?

In all cases, whether the happy path or the error path, the first thing you do is compare the desired state (“there exists a transaction exists charging the customer $5”) with the actual state (“has the customer been charged $5?”) and that determines whether you (re)issue the transaction or just update your internal state.

> once you’ve built sufficient atomicity into your system to handle the actual failure cases - the benefits of taking on the complexity of a DE system are substantially lower than the marketing pitch

I probably agree with this. The main value is probably not in the framework but rather in the larger architecture that it encourages—separating things out into idempotent functions that can be safely retried. I could maybe be persuaded otherwise, but most of my “durable execution” patterns seem to be more of a “controller pattern” (in the sense of a Kubernetes controller, running a reconciling control loop) and it just happens that any distributed, durable controller platform includes a durable execution subsystem.