in order to safely call get_config_dict, config.exists or config.exists_effective need to be called beforehand.
The reason is that the underlying command run will return "Configuration under specified path is empty\n" when the configuration does not exist.
Ideally, this "barrier" call should not be required and the code should be able to detect that failure.
it was suggested that cli-shell-api could provide an error code when the section is missing allowing to detect it occurred.