For mission-critical software like avionics or a nuclear power plant? Absolutely! At design time you better figure out what all the error cases are, and blindly steamrolling over them when they should be triggered makes a bad problem worse (e.g. look at Cloudbleed where unchecked out-of-bounds reads starts disclosing other people's banking information).
Assertions are also usually turned off for performance reasons, not to allow the program to plow through invariants being violated.
Assertions are also usually turned off for performance reasons, not to allow the program to plow through invariants being violated.