? is not "syntactic noise". Having an indication in the code of which operations might throw is very useful, and it enables a further simplification of using ordinary variant records as opposed to a special-cased "checked exception" construct.
A proper language needs to allow the programmer to choose between implicit effects and explicit effects on a case-by-case basis. The reason ? is so tragic is because Rust tried to go with explicit effects only, but found that people wanted implicit effects, and ? is the closest that Rust can get. That's why it's syntactic noise: The programmer wants to get rid of it, they don't regard it as informative for this case, but they can't get rid of it.
(And checked exceptions can be perfectly well implemented with regular data, you don't need any special cases - in fact, you can do it with the same infrastructure that's already been added in a special-cased form for async/await support...)
Also, being able to call unsafe code inside unsafe functions is now considered a design mistake, and there is ongoing work to revert the default – requiring unsafe blocks even in unsafe functions: https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2585-unsafe-block-in-unsafe...
[1]: https://docs.rs/anyhow/1.0.42/anyhow/trait.Context.html