unwrap() and the family of methods like it are a Rust anti-pattern from the early days of Rust. It dates back to before many of the modern error-handling and safety-conscious features of the language and type system.

Rust is being pulled in so many different directions from new users that the language perhaps never originally intended. Some engineers will be fine with panicky behavior, but a lot of others want to be able to statically guarantee most panics (outside of perhaps memory allocation failures) cannot occur.

We need more than just a linter on this. A new language feature that poisons, marks, or annotates methods that can potentially panic (for reasons other than allocation) would be amazing. If you then call a method that can panic, you'll have to mark your own method as potentially panicky. The ideal future would be that in time, as more standard library and 3rd party library code adopts this, we can then statically assert our code cannot possibly panic.

As it stands, I'm pretty mortified that some transitive dependency might use unwrap() deep in its internals.