Both listIndexes and listCollections do shard role acquisitions (autoGet in listCollections) which may result in calls to wiredTiger. In suites which enable WiredTiger failpoints that cause reads to throw write conflict exceptions, this can cause these operations to bubble up WriteConlicts to the user.

In practice, this should not actually be a production issue because read only transactions do not throw WriteConflictExceptions. However, the general guidance is to act as though any access to WiredTiger could throw a WriteConflictException and thus these places should handle this error.