Sure, but the crucial difference is that all the unwraps in your code are then hooks that a linter can find, or simply grepping for unwrap in your codebase and

Sure, but the crucial difference is that all the unwraps in your code are then hooks that a linter can find, or simply grepping for unwrap in your codebase and do a manual audit of those pieces of code. In my experiments with Rust that's been a very nice way of working: first build a very barebones version getting the basic happy path right, and then getting all the tedious stuff right afterwards by eliminating all the unwraps. By making it explicit, you now have a concrete thing you can audit specifically, rather than every pointer access in your entire program and every pointer you pass off to a library.