The persistent settings have historically often led to bugs (see A26, but that's far from the only example).
The trouble is that this usually leads to the game setup being completely unusable, often requiring clearing the MatchSettings.json file (or de-activating it in the settings if one knows that is there).
Furthermore, mods can make the persistentSettings take 'bad' values, and in general this behaviour is prone to unexpected breakage and difficult to defend against.
I think it's worth wrapping in a limited try-catch block, so that at least things don't become completely broken. Note that in general this might lead to just ignoring the one broken setting, which is probably as good as it'll get.
The patch still relays the error with a more useful error message.
Example with the A26 victory conditions bug:
{F3027312}