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which has had some backlash of late? it seems that one should not be liberal in any capacity because it results in undetected corner-cases

https://ardalis.com/postels-law-robustness-principle/

https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-03....

Postel's law is for when it's hopeless to get to a sane standard in the near-to-mid term, as with HTML and JS back in the day. Browsers had to implement ridiculously lenient parsing to provide a reasonable user experience on top of terrible markup and scripts.

In the case of binary formats, the application of Postel's "Law" is in practice only a workaround, used when there existed multiple different interpretations of a vague standard. If the standard had been defined properly in the first place, workarounds wouldn't have been needed.

I've seen Postel's Law being made official recommendation even — in an addendum document to a standard. The addendum got published only because the situation had become a mess.

And all the problems it creates.

But then, if your standard is broken, living with the problems caused by Postel's law is much easier than with the problems caused by not following it.