Agreed. Depending too much on global state sounds risky, though I suppose it depends on how you abstract it. You could have two types of 'globals'. One being the traditional scopeless variable, local to each process, and the other a process that is registered somewhere that makes it easy to find. So, instead of requiring pre-knowledge of the pid, you can find it easily. That sort of sounds like a global variable, but it wouldn't be limited to just storing a value.
Unfortunately, you'd still need to handle the problems that would occur if one of those global procs died, or if the table got corrupted.
