Given the context and what the configuration file contains, I'd argue it's mission-critical for the software to keep running with the previous configuration. Otherwise you might shutdown the internet. Honestly, I'm pretty sure their pre-rewrite version had such logic, and it was forgotten or still on the TODO pile for the rewrite version.

At a previous job (cloud provider), we've had exactly this kind of issue, with exactly the same root cause. The entrypoint for the whole network had a set of rules (think a NAT gateway) that were reloaded periodically from the database. Someone rewrote that bit of plumbing from Python to Go. Someone else performed a database migration. Suddenly, the plumbing could not find the data, and pushed an empty file to prod. The rewrite lacked "if empty, do nothing and raise an alert", that the previous one had. I'll let you imagine what happened next :)