© 2022 American Physical Society.In most cases, excited-state quantum phase transitions can be associated with the existence of critical points (local extrema or saddle points) in a system's classical limit energy functional. However, an excited-state quantum phase transition might also stem from the lowering of the asymptotic energy of the corresponding energy functional. One such example occurs in the two-dimensional (2D) limit of the vibron model, once an anharmonic term in the form of a quadratic bosonic number operator is added to the Hamiltonian. This case has been studied in the broken-symmetry phase [Pérez-Bernal and Álvarez-Bajo, Phys. Rev. A 81, 050101 (2010)10.1103/PhysRevA.81.050101]. In the present work we delve further into the nature of this excited-state quantum phase transition and we characterize it in the symmetric phase of the model, making use of quantities such as the effective frequency, the expected value of the quantum number operator, the participation ratio, the density of states, and the quantum fidelity susceptibility. In addition to this, we extend the usage of the quasilinearity parameter, introduced in molecular physics, to characterize the phases in the spectrum of the anharmonic 2D limit of the vibron model and a practical analysis is included with the characterization of the critical energies for the linear isomers HCN and HNC.