This is exactly why I cringe at these seemingly minor issues - sure htop breaks, it can be worked around, but the root cause is more fundamental; an unprivilege

This is exactly why I cringe at these seemingly minor issues - sure htop breaks, it can be worked around, but the root cause is more fundamental; an unprivileged user should not be able to crash the whole OS just by reading the process table, no matter how invasive. It makes me think what they have decided to change between Sierra and HS to cause this sort of failure. This is pretty fundamental and implies some tinkering deep in the kernel, potentially without fully understanding the repercussions. With the number of security holes that can be easily opened by naive tweaks to low-level code, I think we're right to be nervous about what they've done to cause this.