Steps to reproduce the issue

Create/edit article, mistype date in any of the date fields (not using the date picker) on the Publishing tab.
Proper date: 2025-04-23 12:01:40
Mistyped date: 20225-04-23 12:01:40

Expected result

Handle error properly and show error banner, going back to article edit. Prevent data loss.

Actual result

Throws error:
Call to a member function format() on false

System information (as much as possible)

PHP Built On Linux 6.1.102-111.182.amzn2023.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue Aug 13 22:23:09 UTC 2024 x86_64
Database Type mysql
Database Version 8.0.40
Database Collation utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci
Database Connection Collation utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci
Database Connection Encryption None
Database Server Supports Connection Encryption Yes
PHP Version 8.3.19
Web Server Apache/2.4.62 (Amazon Linux) OpenSSL/3.2.2
WebServer to PHP Interface fpm-fcgi
Joomla! Version Joomla! 5.3.0 Stable [ Timu ] 15-April-2025 16:00 GMT
Joomla Backward Compatibility Plugin Enabled (classes_aliases:"1", es5_assets:"1")
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.4 Safari/605.1.15

Additional comments

None