So, you're not wrong ... but the table-saw argument is a straw-man.
There's a company that sells a revolutionary table saw with intelligent saw stop precisely because experienced, skilled practitioners regularly cut off their fingers.
In general "be smarter / do better" is not a reasonable prescription for large numbers of people. Empirically, if people are fucking up, it makes sense to analyze why and to give them automatic solutions to their fuck-ups.
I don't see it as a straw-man as I see threads as a tool. Existence of the actor model does not detract from the value that OS threads provide, the same way that existence of Common Lisp does not detract from the value that C provides. They are both tools. It's just that some tools are more dangerous than others. In other words, I don't believe that threads are a "worse is better" approach. There are things that can be improved about the specific implementations of threading, but on the whole, the paradigm is far from broken.
> Empirically, if people are fucking up, it makes sense to analyze why and to give them automatic solutions to their fuck-ups.
The problem is that other implementations of concurrency are not as widely adopted and people tend to fall back on threads (especially OS threads) when they really don't need them. But when you really do need threads, very few things are a good substitute.
P.S.: I am aware of the table saw you refer to, and this is the kind of improvement that tooling around threads could use. Note that this new table saw does not completely re-design how you interact with the blade in order to provide the safety.
There's a company that sells a revolutionary table saw with intelligent saw stop precisely because experienced, skilled practitioners regularly cut off their fingers.
In general "be smarter / do better" is not a reasonable prescription for large numbers of people. Empirically, if people are fucking up, it makes sense to analyze why and to give them automatic solutions to their fuck-ups.