It's still a distributed problem if it's going over a network, even if you don't need consensus specifically.
I don't think you would get the same benefits as Erlang unless you either actually write in Erlang or replicate the whole fault tolerant culture and ecosystem that Erlang has created to deal with the fact that it is designed around unreliable networks. And while I haven't worked with multi-node BEAM, I bet single-node is still more reliable than multi-node. Removing a source of errors is still less errors.
If your argument is that we should in fact run everything on BEAM or equivalently powerful platforms, I'm all on board. My current project is on Elixir/Phoenix.
> replicate the whole fault tolerant culture and ecosystem
I think the idea is to move the general SaaS industry from the local monolith optimum to the better global distributed optimum that Erlang currently inhabits. Or rather, beyond the Erlang optimum insofar as we want the benefits of the Erlang operation model without restricting ourselves to the Erlang developer/package ecosystem. So yeah, the broader "micro service" culture hasn't yet caught up to Erlang because industry-wide culture changes don't happen over night, especially considering the constraints involved (compatibility with existing software ecosystems). This doesn't mean that the current state of the art of microservices is right for every application or even most applications, but it doesn't mean that they're fundamentally unworkable either.
At the language level, I think you probably need at least the lightweight, crashable processes. I don't think you can just casually just bring the rest of the industry forward to that standard without changing the language.
I don't think you would get the same benefits as Erlang unless you either actually write in Erlang or replicate the whole fault tolerant culture and ecosystem that Erlang has created to deal with the fact that it is designed around unreliable networks. And while I haven't worked with multi-node BEAM, I bet single-node is still more reliable than multi-node. Removing a source of errors is still less errors.
If your argument is that we should in fact run everything on BEAM or equivalently powerful platforms, I'm all on board. My current project is on Elixir/Phoenix.