Depends. Is a kernel panic better than something acting wrongly? I prefer my kernel not to panic, at the expense of some error somewhere that may or may not crash my system.
If you look at the output of `dmesg` on any Linux system you often will see errors even in a perfectly working system. This is because programs of that size are by definition not perfect, there are bugs, the hardware itself has bugs, thus you want the system to keep running even if something is not working 100% right. Most of the time you will not even notice it.
> First of all, making a problem both obvious and easier to solve is better.
It's the same with assertions: useful for debugging, but we all disable them in production, when the program is not in the hands of a developer but of the customer, since for a customer a system that crashes completely is worse than a system that has some bugs somewhere.