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Quite a lot of hardware devices have broken encoders. I noticed just how inconsistent it is if software will tolerate invalid files or work around it.

Seems these days a there’s more of a preference to outright refuse invalid files since they could be exploit attempts.

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The interesting thing about the situation I mentioned is that while the encoding algorithm was wrong, the actual output was valid JPEG that simply didn't look quite visually correct. But you're right, invalid encoding can be a problem too, and I have noticed during testing that a lot of decoders are quite forgiving of it.

Ah yeah that is an interesting case. In my situation, a thermal camera I got was inserting an invalid frame at the start which likely got used by their proprietary program to store data. VLC would view it but most of Mac/iOS would refuse to play the video until I used ffmpeg to delete the invalid frame.

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