No idea at all why you're downvoted. I came to erlang after spending years working on a C++, actor model, message passing codebase. Unsurprisingly (although it was to me at the time) I felt quite at home.

The difficulty came from the new syntax and Erlang-style control flow. And as you say, those are entirely a matter of familiarity. I still find python to be more readable and writable, but by no means does that imply Erlang is not understandable.