I don't *think* that that is true.  (I'm not 100% sure).

I *think* that any code that happens in a typical init/start function, like the configuration parsing, will be run on the main thread and will thus cause a shutdown automatically if an error is thrown.  I *think* that shutdown-on-error is only necessary in cases where, in your init/start function, you are (explicitly or via a library call) spawning off a background thread to do some work, and the problem is when the exception occurs on that background thread.  I think that's the case for the Jetty startup (and thus the BindException doesn't cause a shutdown at present), but that the config parsing exception would behave as we'd expect/desire.