That can happen with exposed proximity filters, when the manual input is set - that expects an array of values, but as the values come from an URL, it might be a string (unexpected data type).
This is very fragile, as we can never know, what values come in via GET.
We should look into options for better parameter handling. Didn't dig into that, yet.
Full message:
TypeError: Cannot access offset of type string on string in backdrop_array_set_nested_value() (line 8010 of ...core/includes/common.inc).