The normal behaviour of the nRf24 modules is to send an acknowledge when a message is received and that allows radio-write() to know that the message has been received and acknowledged. I put those words in bold because you must read them as a unit. It is possible for the message to be received and for the acknowledgement to fail, but the sender will not know that.
The ability of the sender to automatically retry the transmission depends on the expectation of an ack.
The error will only be reported to the Arduino after all the retries have failed.
You can disable the auto-ack feature if necessary.
The best way to verify communication is to send a message at regular intervals and if the gap between messages exceeds the interval the receiver will know there is a problem. For my own systems I allow several missed messages (about 1 second in total) before shutting things down.
I have certainly had my nRF24s show spurious results - usually when one of the pair was not working properly. But I don't recall any problems when the pair are working properly. I can switch one off and the other one recognizes that and when I switch on again communication resumes smoothly.
...R