Lists of Unicode points (integers), specifically. That said, most real world string manipulation is done by passing them as binaries. It really isn't much of an issue, nowhere near as much as is the hell that is NULL-terminated character arrays in C, which, mind you, power most of our software nonetheless.
Erlang does have a good Protocol Buffers library, by the way: https://github.com/basho/erlang_protobuffs. Even if it didn't, you'd use a more native serialization format like BERT.
As for abandoned projects and library sprawl, that is true. However, I'd say that this is far more bearable in Erlang than in other languages. For one, the module system makes deducing how to use a program's API from source code much easier even if there is no explicit documentation - every Erlang program basically gets a user interface for free just by virtue of being a module. In addition, if the library in question is a properly structured OTP application or if it uses vanilla process primitives efficiently, I can have relative confidence that it is less likely to blow up in my face than, e.g. a random Java library.
Even still, there's all sorts of libraries despite the small community. If you're doing web development and there's some RESTful API that has no Erlang bindings, those are relatively trivial to roll yourself.
Erlang does have a good Protocol Buffers library, by the way: https://github.com/basho/erlang_protobuffs. Even if it didn't, you'd use a more native serialization format like BERT.
As for abandoned projects and library sprawl, that is true. However, I'd say that this is far more bearable in Erlang than in other languages. For one, the module system makes deducing how to use a program's API from source code much easier even if there is no explicit documentation - every Erlang program basically gets a user interface for free just by virtue of being a module. In addition, if the library in question is a properly structured OTP application or if it uses vanilla process primitives efficiently, I can have relative confidence that it is less likely to blow up in my face than, e.g. a random Java library.
Even still, there's all sorts of libraries despite the small community. If you're doing web development and there's some RESTful API that has no Erlang bindings, those are relatively trivial to roll yourself.