Funny enough we actually started prototyping with Erlang for subsequent project (which was cancelled before it went far). Unfortunately I don't know enough to know what's special about the Erlang scheduler (if anything), but as I understand the Erlang concurrency model, it's mostly about not sharing memory (forces explicit communication). That's obviously going to eliminate a host of bugs, but it would have been way too expensive for the mentioned firmware.
Once we got started with Erlang I was pretty turned off. The pretty examples you see in tutorials aren't what you'll be using. Instead it's framework upon framework, far from elegance IMO. I was happy to not have to deal with that again. Today I'd probably choose Rust for the same task (static types FTW).
Given that Erlang is sufficiently different from anything else I've seen, it doesn't surprise me that trying to be productive in Erlang before you knew it well enough was suboptimal experience. I like it, and more specifically Elixir, quite a bit, but the learning curve was steep.
It's fair to say Erlang's strength or appeal is not the language itself but the platform you instruct with it. That's also where the learning curve is.
Once we got started with Erlang I was pretty turned off. The pretty examples you see in tutorials aren't what you'll be using. Instead it's framework upon framework, far from elegance IMO. I was happy to not have to deal with that again. Today I'd probably choose Rust for the same task (static types FTW).
(EDIT: typos)