I don't code in Erlang or Elixir, aside from messing about. But I've found that letting an entire application crash is something that I can do under certain circumstances, especially when "you have a very big problem and will not go to space today". For example, if there's an error reading some piece of data that's in the application bundle and is needed to legitimately start up in the first place (assets for my game for instance). Then upon error it just "screams and dies" (spits out a stack trace and terminates).