Huh, the mystery deepens. Does TexLive really behave differently on Linux?
Anyway, I'd argue that Org should do the minimum to prevent Latex crashes. It seems that org is aiming to be a generic document format, which can be exported to other formats without modification.
But with the current behavior, that's not possible. If I modify the org doc to avoid latex crashes (escaping the '#' in the URL), then the same document exported to html will not work; click on the html link and you'll get a 404 error.