> Errors are often simply swallowed.

That's a bit of a misrepresentation. Error handling on the BEAM has a few more layers than in other environments; specifically, the supervision tree can be used to "let things fail". That's not the layer where you should log or handle failures - that's a safety net that ensures your whole system won't go down if your error handling in a single process doesn't work.

For error handling, there are roughly these layers:

    - functions can return {:ok, value} or {:error, error}
    - functions can raise errors (similar to exceptions) that can be caught
    - processes can be monitored from the outside, you get notified when they die
    - processes can be linked and exits can be trapped, also notifying you on failure
    - supervisors can handle process deaths in a configurable manner
    - higher-level behaviours often expose their own error handling callbacks