I don't think it's so cumbersome with modern python. There's first class coroutines, futures, process pools and such now. Also there are a number of queues systems in python which easily allow running failed tasks again. One project I use is basically task(func, args). That's it. Then if it fails we can have them automatically restart, or wait for review etc. This is over multiple machines too. It's only about 60 lines of code, including nice gui interfaces to manage the tasks, and deploy the whole lot to various machines.

Erlang is amazing of course. Just wanted to say that some of those patterns are now available in python and easily usable. Not common to all python code, which is where I think erlang wins out. It puts this stuff front and center, and has first class support. Looking at a random erlang code base, you'll probably see it there. Random python code bases... not so much (ok, queue systems are quite common in Django/Flask projects). It's very rare to see python greelets/eventlets in the wild for example, but generators and async stuff are becoming quite commonplace.

Also python has single dispatch now (built in, not in a third party library). Another thing which Erlang does well (pattern matching). Again, not so commonly used except in modern python shops. These combined with quickcheck for python (hypothesis), and gradual typing really have made modern python a much more happy place. Erlang deserves some big respect for spreading good ideas.