V6: Use of assert statement risks uncaught AssertionError

[Shah91n]

Description:
The code uses the assert statement, which throws an AssertionError (a subclass of Throwable, not Exception). Standard try...catch (Exception e) blocks will not catch this error. If an assertion fails and assertions are enabled at runtime, the uncaught AssertionError can propagate up, potentially terminating the service.

Root Cause:

• AssertionError is not caught by catch (Exception e).

Impact:

• If assertions are enabled in a production environment (intentionally or accidentally), a failing assertion can cause thread death or JVM termination.

[bevzzz]

If assertions are enabled in a production environment

In that case any assertion would terminate the service, not just the ones in our lib. That being said, I see that there may be places where throwing an exception is more user friendly, like in cases where a data type is not supported yet, but the database may return it.

[bevzzz]

I revisited all the places where we use asserts in a recent PR and replaced with exceptions those which could happen due to anything but our (maintainers') error.