That happens in Everything when it can't get a database connection. As you say, that only happens under high loads, or when someone falls asleep on the database power switch. From that error message, I could probably find the particular modules vroom's modified to set up Perl Monks, but that depends on whether or not I have an account on willowisp or not. :)

I don't use fatalsToBrowser in production code for precisely that reason. It's easy enough to add in paranoid error checking and give the user something sane while logging enough detail to make troubleshooting easier. But that's just the way Everything is configured straight out of the tarball.