Yeah, the raw JSON (in my case) is the result of a failed tool call, it was trying to generate an image. With thinking models, you can observe the degeneration of its understanding of image tool calls over the lifetime of a chat. It eventually puzzles over where images are supposed to be emitted, how it's supposed to write text, if it's allowed to provide commentary - and eventually, it gets all of it wrong. This also happens with file cites (in projects) and web search calls.
I’ve also had it fail to respond in long chats but I thought it was a network error despite having no error messages.