In vendor startup code, initialization function were called as parameters of assert statement. With DEVELHELP, they are not called since the assert macro does nothing.
Usually, the access to the IROM (flash) memory requires 32-bit word aligned reads. Attempts to access data in the IROM (flash) memory less than 32 bits in size triggers a LoadStoreError exception. With the exception handler from esp-open-rtos it becomes possible to access data in IROM (flash) with a size of less than 32 bits and thus to place .rodata sections in the IROM (flash).