I mostly agree with you, but it feels a bit handwave-y. That such bugs are less serious is maybe true for a particular class of idioms and a particular class of

I mostly agree with you, but it feels a bit handwave-y. That such bugs are less serious is maybe true for a particular class of idioms and a particular class of problems that, say, dominate CRUD application design. Unsynchronized writes are also detectable at runtime, I would guess (having done no production Erlang work) with around the same order of false negatives as a stuck mailbox. TSan will only find the race if it occurs relatively close temporally; mailbox scanning will only find the stuck message if the send rate is sufficiently high. TSan is a lot more expensive but can be productively used during test suites. Mailbox scanning seems likely to fire false positives and only works in a complete running system. In the end, only simpler program design can save us.