FWIW, I've never had a theme related crash, evidenced by the fact that switching themes did not crash bugs in gtk apps if I encountered any.
We have bug reports coming especially from people using the Oxygen theme, which had a tendency to (against all recommendations) poke at the widget structure behind the style contexts because what could possibly go wrong.
Given the ability to inject random C code into applications that do not expect that, people will abuse it; hence the switch to a pure declarative language like CSS to describe the aspect of widgets. Your app may look like crap, but it won't crash because of that.