Eclipse Photon plug-in crashes with _cairo_operator_bounded_by_source: Assertion: 'NOT REACHED' failed.

On Red Hat Linux, after installing the Eclipse plug-in for Eclipse Photon, clicking on the Location in the report (or any action that triggers opening the editor to the line of source code) causes Eclipse to crash.

Symptom

After Eclipse crashes, the console contains the following error:
*WARNING: SWT requires Cairo 1.9.4 or newer
*WARNING: Detected: 1.8.8
...
...
java:cairo-misc.c:380:_cairo_operator_bounded_by_source: Assertion 'NOT REACHED' failed.

Cause

An older version of Cairo is detected on the system. SWT requires Cairo 1.9.4 or newer.

Resolution

Update the Cairo version.

However, some RHEL systems may not support the latest Cairo version. For example, on RHEL 6.8 with Cairo 1.8.8 installed:
>sudo yum install cairo-devel

Setting up Install Process
client-rhn | 3.7 kB 00:00
Package cairo-devel-1.8.8-6.el6_6x86_64 already installed and latest version
Nothing to do

Note that the latest version was not picked up. In such a situation, moving to a newer Linux kernel version may help.

Some online resources indicate that you can work around the issue by adding the following line to the eclipse.ini file after -vmargs:
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.cairoGraphics-false
However, this workaround is inconsistent and seems not to work with RHEL 6.8.