Raise exceptions instead of using assertions for control flow
Motivated by https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/issues/12789 in Transformers, one welcoming change would be replacing assertions with proper exceptions. The only type of assertions we should keep are those used as sanity checks.

Currently, there is a total of 87 files with the `assert` statements (located under `datasets` and `src/datasets`), so when working on this, to manage the PR size, only modify 4-5 files at most before submitting a PR.