Robert Blackburn shows us one way to handle bad dates when moving to Spark 3:
Moving from a Spark 2 to a Spark 3 runtime has a lot of benefits including big performance improvements through adaptive query execution, dynamic partition pruning, and other optimizations. Some updates may require you to refactor your code. One of them is Delta tables now use the Proleptic Gregorian Calendar. Isn’t a calendar a calendar? Unfortunately, no. The Julian calendar has discrepancies with old dates. Specifically dates before 1582 and timestamps before 1900. Here we will dynamically update these dates for incoming source files.
If you would like to follow along in detail, I have a sample notebook that uses the community edition of Databricks. The DBC Archive file is here and the source file is here.
Fortunately, this change is unlikely to affect most of us, with perhaps the most common issue being that you used 0001-01-01 as a default date.