I understood “crashing” as them not catching the exception.

Most functions can fail, and any user-facing app has to be prepared for it so that it behaves gracefully towards the user. In that sense I agree that the error reporting mechanism doesn’t matter. It’s unclear though what the difference was for the GP.

I'm not sure I understand how both occurred at once. Typically an uncaught exception will result in a crash, but this would generally be considered an error at the call site (i.e. failing to handle error conditions.)