on kernel panic the entire OS is considered a lost cause, kernel included. DRM Panic is likely safe enough because ultimately it just dumps data onto a buffer in memory. Launching a userspace process, however, is infinitely more dangerous: it goes through the VFS layer, does arbitrary IO, can call arbitrary syscalls, etc... disk corruption is a lot worse than not telling the user about a panic
Most OSs just insta reboot on panic because of this... see: pstore