It appears, from my testing and from the Firefox debugger, that the error callback in DraftReviewResource.publish() has the same args as .save(), that is, (model, xhr, ...).  I believe an earlier change to just (xhr) for the publish() error callback was in error.

Manually generated a PublishError via an extension.  Confirmed that the message did not appear in the alert dialog without the fix, and that it did with the fix.