Wrap PRELOAD_MODELS decoding failures with the setting name and expected top-level shape so startup errors point directly to the invalid configuration. Document the required array format and cover scalar and empty-array inputs.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Co-authored-by: localai-org-maint-bot <306269227+localai-org-maint-bot@users.noreply.github.com>