Bad title. Interesting bug, and it shows you just how much being aware of implementation details can pay off. I'm kind of surprised that Erlang doesn't keep a 'length' field under the hood for lists, but that's nothing the OP couldn't fix by keeping one for himself.
The Erlang VM fix isn't really a fix from a user point of view, installing a package like this should not require patching the VM, I do think that the Erlang VM maintainers should be made aware of this issue and then they can decide if they want to roll the patch or a more serious version of that patch into the distribution, it would seem to me that they are not the only people that have been hit by this bug.
As for the bad title: The higher level your language the more place there is for bugs to hide and if you actually believed that higher level languages would isolate you from the machine sufficiently that you could ignore reality then you had it coming.