Axios crashes the Node.js process when the request fails

I had some code using axios to make a network request:

axios({
  method: 'post',
  url: 'https://...',
  data: JSON.stringify({
		...
  })
})

but I noticed that when the request failed for some reason, it crashed the Node.js process.

..until I added catch():

axios({
  method: 'post',
  url: 'https://...',
  data: JSON.stringify({
		...
  })
}).catch((err) => {
  console.error(err)
})