Yeah, it's literally a subset of Common Lisp's condition system. With Lisp's closure and continuation, it's easy to implement the feature. When I read the blog, I was wondering is renaming old concepts with exotic names and making them new the trend now?
Unlike the condition system algebraic effects are typed so you can reason about them at compilation time and ensure all of them are at least used somewhat correctly.
It makes quite a bit of difference when I compare e.g. async programming in OCaml with Lwt/Async where I know I've at least hooked up the promises somewhat correctly with e.g. Python or JS where I will notice that it is wrong when the code is executed.
