> If the `.unwrap()` was replaced with `.expect("Feature config is too large!")` it would certainly make the outage shorter.

It wouldn't, not meaningfully. The outage was caused by change in how they processed the queries. They had no way to observe the changes, nor canaries to see that change is killing them. Plus, they would still need to manually feed and restart services that ingested bad configs.

`expect` would shave a few minutes; you would still spend hours figuring out and fixing it.

Granted, using expect is better, but it's not a silver bullet.