If you mean distributed to mean "over multiple computers", then ya... this is a really specialized field. Your ability to synchronize and maintain hard real-timeness between computers is completely dependent on IO and hardware features, and topology. This makes it much harder to make a generalized framework.

We we ignore the distributed portion, then you're describing a real-time operating system - in which case something like https://www.freertos.org/ might fit the bill?

Perhaps the idea that message passing has to happen realtime is something obvious or elementary to military/defense/aerospace from technical requirements or experiences fighting fog of war etc., but to me it was dumbfounding new and I guess it might also be for the general public?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:4D-RCS_reference_model_ar...

Erlang came out of Ericcson when they were building giant telephone switches.

Nowadays things like RabbitMQ and WhatsApp run on the Beam VM.

The beam handles both local and remote nodes, mostly transparently.

Then there are things like Nomad or k8s which try to tackle the problem more like *nix(linux/BSD/etc) does, but across multiple nodes. These are not meant for hard real-time systems like launching rockets obviously, not even for soft real-time.