I'm not fully clear why we need to be checking that the kwargs are only Text properties here... the end result if you pass something that is not is an AttributeError being raised anyway.

I suppose you could make an argument that you want to avoid setting the locations if you cannot also set the labels (preserving it as an atomic operation) but I'm not fully convinced that is needed here.
If that is the goal, I think we could come up with many more places that would require similar checks, and even additional checks on this method (e.g. insuring that the length of the labels is equal to the length of the provided locations... this is already checked deeper in the call stack, and even mentions set_ticks in the error message already)

Even if atomic operation is desirable here, I might advocate for a "forgiveness" approach, where we try to do everything, catch it, reset to original positions and reraise.
Do other maintainers have opinions here?

I am all for erroring out rather than silently dropping kwargs if labels are not provided, though.