We are so foolhardy that we are using NSCollectionView in an internal project that gets widely used by an enterprise client of ours. We found this latest crashing bug while updating the application for macOS 10.12 wich is where the issue first appeared.
The only workaround at this time is to remove animation via animator() and replace it with a reloadData. Thus we vote NSCollectionView for worst Apple API on macOS.
This bug is filed as rdar://28337446 and on Open Radar.