In this particular case though I don't think it would matter much. I've looked pretty closely at how the BEAM does it's thing and it's a work of art, this particular trade-off is more one of convenience than of necessity. But you are right that Erlang is full of such clever (and beautiful) tricks which make it a very interesting codebase to study.
If you take out enough simplifying implementation details, you no longer have a powerful system built from simple parts.