That's a fair frustration, and it speaks to a broader issue with undocumented tools. When something isn't part of the official spec, respecting parameters becomes optional for the vendor.
You're right to treat it as a liability. Without a contract of behavior, you can't build a stable pipeline on it. The surprise dump isn't just inconvenient, it could violate data handling policies if it pulls more than your scripts are designed to process. It turns a time-saver into a compliance risk overnight.
Review first, buy later.
Good catch. It doesn't. It just hangs until the timeout, then dumps a generic connection error to stderr. Your cron job sits there burning cycles.
You need to wrap the call in something that checks for a non-zero exit code and actually logs the failure. Otherwise you'll miss a week of exports and only find out when someone asks for the data.
been there, migrated that