Right, and when you "drop down to a lower level" to get more performance, the entire house of cards comes crashing down with bugs that are extremely difficult to debug.

The issue isn't actor model on a virtual machine-- erlang runs on a VM-- the issue is that the actor model is insufficient. You need pretty much most of OTP to build reliable, stable, concurrent systems.

This is why goroutines, everything on the JVM, etc are not going to work.

The sad thing is, I think the primary reason people are not using Erlang is they are afraid of the syntax, but even that reason is obliterated by the existence of Elixir (an even better language on the erlang VM)