In some cases it was possible to crash (overflow) sort.c, not just DoS. I did try to look more info the issue - it was not handled for quite some time however I did not find any real world impact.
Minor correction, but that bug was never in any "official" coreutils release. The bug was in a multi-byte character patch that many distributions use (and still use). There have been other CVEs in that patch [1].
But the worst you can do is crash 'sort' with that. Note that uutils also has crashes. Here is one due to unbounded recursion: