I use unwrap a lot, and my most frequent target is unwrapping the result of Mutex::lock. Most applications have no reasonable way to recover from lock poisoning, so if I were forced to write a match for each such use site to handle the error case, the handler would have no choice but to just call panic anyway. Which is equivalent to unwrap, but much more verbose.
Perhaps it needs a scarier name, like "assume_ok".
I use locks a lot too, and I always return a Result from lock access. Sometimes an anyhow::Result, but still something to pass up to the caller.
This lets me do logging at minimum. Sometimes I can gracefully degrade. I try to be elegant in failure as possible, but not to the point where I wouldn't be able to detect errors or would enter a bad state.
That said, I am totally fine with your use case in your application. You're probably making sane choices for your problem. It should be on each organization to decide what the appropriate level of granularity is for each solution.
My worry is that this runtime panic behavior has unwittingly seeped into library code that is beyond our ability and scope to observe. Or that an organization sets a policy, but that the tools don't allow for rigid enforcement.
