One Faulty Plugin Shouldn’t Kill Your Blockchain Node. In Reth, It Does.
Reth’s ExEx plugin system has a fatal architectural flaw: when a plugin panics, spawn_critical_task kills the entire node. This violates the core principle of fault isolation that makes plugin architectures work. The fix isn’t just catching panics — it’s rethinking the boundary between core and extension so that a plugin crash becomes a log entry, not an outage.