It's likely that the idea was either misunderstood or not expressed properly. That paragraph is kind of true... just written in a very weird way that doesn't really show this process in a good light.

Yes, Erlang embraces failure and provides ways do deal with it by design. No, it's not a replacement for exceptions. Especially that Erlang does have exceptions to deal with the typical "could fail, so we'll just `try` it" programming.