The real safety hazard is anything that makes it harder to evacuate the plane, such as bulky clothing or eye-wear that make it harder to see in the dark or through smoke.
I particularly like the "He's doing it anyway" comment.
I imagine there are situations where they can't descend though.
On the other hand, even at 3000-4000 feet per minute, it can take a while to get from 35,000 to 10,000 ft.
If you really want nightmares about flying in that region, I recommend looking at the approach to Paro airport. 7.5k elevation, surrounded by 18k peaks, horrifying turbulences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbLHah4XUwk (Paro landing)
If you did try to fly an airliner down at a 45 degree angle, you would either have to do it with a falling-leaf stall after slowing to about 150kts (I doubt this is possible in an airliner?) or you would quickly break the speed of sound and the aircraft would disintegrate as the wings and stabilizers were ripped off. A max rate descent feels steep, but it's not that steep lol.
Some transport aircraft like the C-17 can deploy thrust reverses in flight to achieve those attitudes. I'm told the people riding in back don't enjoy it though.
I should at least provide a little source material though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUUU-C-7o98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdn0465zE4o
Emergency descent maneuvers in the C-172 and I believe many other small aircraft actually involve a 45 degree roll angle, and whatever pitch angle achieves a desired speed (e.g. 120 kias in the C-172). This produces a tight downward spiral, the spiral helps because it moves lift off the vertical axis which lets you descend more quickly at a fixed speed - otherwise you'll speed up until the wings fall off. I suspect the 45 degrees above may have come from confusion over which axis it was around. I'm not sure what the exact justification is for the choice of 45 degrees but 60 degrees roll angle is usually considered sort of the upper limit (beyond that is technically aerobatics) so 45 is pretty commonly considered the "steep" extreme.
It looks like the procedure is different for the big boys. A quick google shows that the emergency descent procedure for the 747 is thrust closed, speedbrakes at flight position, gear down, make 320 kias. Pitch angle that produces would depend on weight but it's not going to be 45. No spiraling involved, but then 747 seems to (unsurprisingly) have a lower max bank angle (really max load factor) than smaller planes.
The point is you wouldn't even really pay attention to the pitch attitude, you'd pay attention to airspeed. The answer to "what should the pitch be" is pretty much always "whatever results in the airspeed you want."
And of course the landing itself (for airliners at least, that is) will be with the main gear first and only then does the nose wheel come down as well.
Once you've internalised that, you can't help but notice that one style of pictograms typically used to designate the "Arrivals" section of an airport (e.g. https://www.alamy.com/airport-signs-departure-and-arrivals-a...) alarmingly looks rather like a crash landing than a regular landing :-)