[Maxatar]

That Rust produced a predictable and deterministic way of failing, while in C++ the equivalent code of accessing an uninitialized value without verifying it beforehand would have resulted in entirely unpredictable behavior whose reach is entirely unbounded.

[ModernMech]

Moreover, now they realize this is an issue for them, they can just do "Ctrl+F unwrap" and fix each instance. Then they can put a hook on their commits that automatically flag any code with "unwrap". In some languages where you're allowed to just ignore errors, you could fix the proximal bug, but you'd never be sure you weren't causing or ignoring more of the same in the future -- how do you search for what isn't there?

[hyghjiyhu]

Due to the unfortunate naming of unwrap_or and friends it's a little (but only a little) more complicated than ctrl-f.

[phi-go]

You can also forbid unwraps as part of clippy.

[ChristianJacobs]

Not really. It's just "unwrap(" instead.