Yes, exactly this.
What I see a lot is initializing an object from a JSON parser which, when it receives malformed input, either halts execution outright or returns an empty object. In both cases you just want to make sure to handle the error appropriately per-language.
Again, the main offender here is PHP, which makes this issue surprisingly easy to get wrong. (And add "==" to your lint checks! 99% of the time coders mean "===", and this can lead to surprisingly severe security issues.)
If you meant that it would throw or return an error on malformed input, I totally agree. You must always handle errors that your calls might return, and especially when those calls are given anything derived from outside input.
Yes, generally, and specifically that failure to handle this type of error can cause all sorts of plague, pestilence, and application compromise.
But yeah, the article's example of an XCode segfault is a good example of both poor parsing logic and poor isolation of fault domains. If your json processing library can corrupt the whole process then something's wonky.