Not that I'm advocating the approach but I think the benefit is that if your recipient is out of action then your callee survives In a typical Simula I program

Not that I'm advocating the approach but I think the benefit is that if your recipient is out of action then your callee survives In a typical Simula I program (C++ Java PHP C# etc) if you fatal in your recipient's object your callee and the entire program is going to come crashing down, in something like erlang the callee can keep going Before jumping to putting everything on a queue, there are downsides like you've identified which is why there's this comment from Rich Hickey on the erlang variant of Clojure: https://github.com/clojerl/clojerl#but-but-rich-hickey-lists-here-some-of-the-reasons-why-he-chose-not-to-use-the-actor-model-in-clojure https://github.com/clojerl/clojerl#but-but-rich-hickey-lists... Essentially, it's good when you need it but an overhead when you don't, kind of like async in my mind, use it when you absolutely need it, but otherwise, you'd be better operating without it