Wouldn't this be better with design by contract... I don't believe so. No plans survive contact with "the enemy", and the enemy here is input that your system

Wouldn't this be better with design by contract... I don't believe so. No plans survive contact with "the enemy", and the enemy here is input that your system may not have control over (such as processing streaming data from an external source). If we simply turn off the check for release builds, this case would halt the system rather than provide an option to log the offending input contextual information to an error channel and perhaps ignore or recover from the situation (as appropriate).