[staticassertion]

There's one really major distinction - you can `grep` for `unwrap`. You could grep for null, but that won't tell you if an NPE elsewhere is possible, and it won't hit every single case (like 3rd party libs returning null).

Making bugs grep'able is huge.

[jononor]

Greppable also means it is trivially lintable. And the standard linter Clippy defaults since two years to disallow unwrap()