However, rust would be relatively well-suited for a "dirty quick scripting task". You could make a more traditional wrapper for the operations you like to use that assumes these rare edge cases don't happen, and panic otherwise.

This is sort of rust's philosophy; being explicit. Rust has no problem with failing, it just has a problem with failing without you telling it to. If you write a wrapper that implies you are willing to fail on these cases, then you're being explicit by choosing to use these functions instead :)