The dassert tries to read a record out of the catalog using KVCollectionCatalogEntry::getMetadata() which uses WiredTigerRecordStore::findRecord() and that could return a WriteConflictException when the WTSkipPrepareConflictRetries and skipWriteConflictRetries failpoints are enabled, preventing the WiredTigerRecordStore::findRecord() from retrying. Eventually this bubbles up to the caller as a WriteConflict. The dassert is a sanity check in debug builds to ensure that the in-memory index catalog matches the one on-disk.

Running a command that doesn't expect a WriteConflictException such as the collStats command can return a WriteConflict error back to the user in this case.