Reproducing JDK-8227695 has been elusive: while there is an assertion failure in our CI, we never ever managed to reproduce either locally or tens of thousands manual runs in the CI.
There is apparently a very particular set of circumstances where that assertion failure occurs, yet the assertion failure itself does not give enough information for further debugging.
Enhance the assertion to hopefully get more information about the failure. This change should be reverted as part of JDK-8227695 at the latest.