> 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.

That's a false dichotomy, you don't get to choose between definitely crashing or maybe crashing. That would be nice but it's not on the menu. Crashing is just the best case scenario, so if you can make your system stop instead of being incorrect, that's great.

> but we all disable them in production (assertions)

We don't all do that.

I concede that it depends on the use case. You might not care if you got a single user non-networked gaming console for example. A bug could even become a welcomed part of the experience there. I hope these cases are more rare than not though.