Not the same issue in #1972, but the root cause is the same. CMake release modes skip assertion checks by implicitly specifying -NDEBUG flag, hence the check in https://github.com/ros/ros_comm/blob/noetic-devel/clients/roscpp/include/ros/publisher.h#L81 gets skipped. This allows the successful compilation of the following:

...
ros::Publisher chatter_pub = n.advertise<std_msgs::String>("chatter", 1000);
std_msgs::String msg;
msg.data = "hello world ";
std::vector<std_msgs::String> msgs{msg};
chatter_pub.publish(msgs);
...

In my case, the subscriber receives an empty std_msgs/String.

The rationale in http://wiki.ros.org/CppStyleGuide is given as:
"It is typical to develop software with assertion-checking enabled, in order to catch violations. When nearing software completion and when assertions are found to always be true in the face of extensive testing, you build with a flag that removes assertions from compilation, so they take up no space or time."

It is reasonable as all pub/sub relationships should be unit tested. However such testing is very non-trivial and tedious in some cases. Therefore I think that this particular check should not be skipped in release modes, which would facilitate the detection of such type erasure failures on published messages.