> I think the let it fails slogan is taken too literally, especially by people who don't use OTP

I like the philosophy - when taken literally, it saves writing error-handling code at unit-level for an entire class of errors (equivalent to JVMs unchecked exceptions). A well-architected supervision tree will handle that for you, when paired with the excellent out-of-the-box instrumentation for observability.

> You can handle errors and exceptions if you want

Yes, which is why it's standard to pattern-match on a function's results to check if returned a known err or not - after all, (checked) errors are just a return value in Erlang/BEAM.