By coincidence I was talking to one of Cloudflare's engineers this weekend† and they actually argued that the unwrap() isn't the problem per se, that instead it's just wrong to go from "We don't know if this data works" to "Everything is broken" without the step where you check that data works - and that's still true if we're doing this once per minute not once per month.

I argued that requiring expect("expectation") calls rather than unwrap() instils the discipline to consider what you're expecting and thus why you think we won't panic - to write the text in the expect call, but I did not convince them and they remained sure that what Cloudflare needs is better deployment discipline not improved engineering practices.

† It is a coincidence that they work for Cloudflare, it was quite intentional that I spent much of my weekend with them, we were playing video games.