Isn't this independent of the concurrency primitive? It is a fundamental characteristic of making a distributed call to a resource that the application in quest

Isn't this independent of the concurrency primitive? It is a fundamental characteristic of making a distributed call to a resource that the application in question needs to act on the response or the failure of in a timely manner (i.e. not fire-and-forget). Even if you are using actors or the reactor pattern at some point they need the equivalent of a circuit breaker in them. It just pushes it to a lower layer. Unless you're just advocating avoiding distributed calls which require a timely response whenever you can, which I agree with as much as is feasible, but obviously can't always be avoided.