Depends. I have a cluster serving about half a million clients that send binary sensor data every 1-3 minutes. Sometimes the hardware has bugs and send erroneous payloads while the majority just continue running. So instead of spending a lot of time figuring out all of the possible malformed inputs I just let the processes restart in those cases and otherwise resume.

There are certainly ways you can get run away reactions that eventually take down the otp tree regardless of your settings and I probably do more input validation than strictly called for my the erlang guide books but not spending all of my time worrying about those edge cases does have it's upside with out negatively impacting other clients.