If these race conditions are in code that has been in production for years and yet the race conditions are "previously unknown", that does suggest to me that it is in practice quite hard to trigger these race conditions. Bugs that happen regularly in prod (and maybe I'm biased, but especially bugs that happen to erlang systems in prod) tend to get fixed.
> Bugs that happen regularly in prod
It depends on how regular and reproducible they are. Timing bugs are notoriously difficult to pin down. Pair that with let-it-crash philosophy, and it's maybe not worth tracking down. OTOH, Erlang has been used for critical systems for a very long time – plenty long enough for such bugs to be tracked down if they posed real problems in practice.
Now, if it crashes every 10 years, that is regular, but I think the meaning is that it happens often. Back when I operated a large dist cluster, yes, some rare crashes happened that never got noticed or the triage was 'wait and see if it happens again' and it didn't happen. But let it crash and restart from a known good state is a philosophy about structuring error checking more than an operational philosophy: always check for success and if you don't know how to handle an error fail loudly and return to a good state to continue.
Operationally, you are expected to monitor for crashes and figure out how to prevent them in the future. And, IMHO, be prepared to hot load fixes in response... although a lot of organizations don't hot load.