[dnautics]

While this is technically "shared state" (in the same way that a "database", or "the console/log output" is "shared state"), it's not a problem in the classical data race sense. And because you're forced to think about it in an explicit fashion, it's generally not a problem for the working programmer in the BEAM vm.

Also note that erlang is not a pure actor system. It is relatively hard to accidentally write a deadlock in erlang with OTP. In about 3 years of programming elixir I've only written a deadlock three or four times (and caught them all in tests). Even so if I had pushed it to prod, it would have timed out certain operations that would have triggered dynamic restart of the relevant processes.