I created some assets in Affinity Designer. I exported these from Designer, saved to disk, and imported the assets file into Publisher. When I try to use/drag an asset in Publisher, Publisher immediately force crashes. I am using both Affinity Designer and Publisher 1.9 on Apple Silicon (M1).
If I switch to the Designer persona, it still crashes when trying to use/drag an asset. However, if I open the file in Designer, Designer does not crash. If I then try to open the same file in Publisher, Publisher immediately crashes and does not open (!!!).
Update/fix:
I think I figured it out. My assets included artboards (first imported to the asset pane as part of a category and then exported as an assets file). Knowing that Publisher doesn't support artboards, I created a test assets file consisting only of regular Affinity objects--not artboards--such as grouped items. These imported just fine into Publisher without issue. It seems to me that Publisher is trying (and obviously failing) to import an artboard without properly handling that inability, thus resulting in a crash.