The core issue here seems to be that the pasted object is turned into an Empty but it still has all the modifiers. Later when the object is copied by the depsgraph, the modifiers are not copied along, confusing some code. Right now, this patch is rather defensive, so it solves the specific crash and maybe similar cases that could come up in the future. One could separately also clear all modifiers when turning the object into an Empty. Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/143029