The general consensus in the community afaik, is that

  head :: [a] -> a

in Prelude was a mistake, and the default should be to return a Maybe/Optional. Beginners are generally advised to avoid head, and all other partial functions in the Prelude, such as tail and the indexing operator, wherever possible, and rely on pattern matching instead, which is generally sufficient and more idiomatic for the relevant use cases. I agree that having the option to use a partial function is useful, escape hatches are important, but it shouldn't be the go to.

Nonempty was just a simple example. You're right that it's not very commonly used (probably because it's not in Prelude), but the general culture of writing type safe interfaces and pushing guarantees to compile time %100 is a thing. A commonly used, more complicated example might be Servant, which is a web library which statically ensures your implementation meets an API spec.