This very example -- requests were technically illegal all the time without devs realizing, but something in the stack changed to start rejecting them -- demonstrates the fallacy of the "be liberal in what you accept, strict in what you issue" principal. If all the web servers involved had been strict in rejecting the illegal request from the start, they would have noticed the bug in development before deploying to f…
This doesn't demonstrate a fallacy in "be liberal in what you accept" any more than closed source software demonstrates fallacies in Linus's Law. The problem wasn't liberal acceptance, it was that liberal acceptance ended when Cowboy was added to the mix. Strict acceptance would have shown the error earlier, but continued liberal acceptance would have allowed continued functionality.
I think I prefer just adhering to the standard in the first place.