The actor model is a great tool, but I think it's best looked at as a low level concurrency primitive. Most of the time, folks should be working with higher level constructs in conceptually simpler control flow paradigms like call-and-return (async/await) or streams.
In Erlang, all those control flow paradigms exist in library form.
You are right about the actor model being a low-level choice, but its a choice that has to be made since the whole system revolves around allowing/disallowing shared state.
