The error wasn't ignored, it was logged (and it's an example on a web forum, in reality you'd at least increment a metric too and do other things).

> General top level exceptions handlers are a huge code smell

And yet millions of programs have such things and they work fine. My experience has been that they tend to be more reliable than other programs. E.g. IntelliJ hardly ever tears down the entire process when something goes wrong, it fails gracefully and reports back to HQ whereas other IDEs I've used hard crash quite regularly. Much more disruptive.