That's not entirely true. Erlang OTP allows for selective receive, and will stash unhandled messages to the side. When a received message is handled, all unhandled messages are retried because the actor may have changed what messages it can handle as a result. This is fine in Erlang - if the actor process crashes for exceeding allocated memory, it has no impact on other actors.

The original Scala Actors did this as well, with predictable results. Scala runs on the JVM, which is a monolithic process. The usage of selective receive meant that over time, actors would accumulate enough unhandled messages to result in a possible OutOfMemoryError, from which there is no recovery on the JVM. Akka does not do selective receive, so it does not entirely follow OTP.

That said, it is inspired by OTP, as evidenced by the original name of the project, Scala OTP. It's just optimized for the JVM.