unwrap is no different than not catching an exception in other languages. It’s handy for those times that you really can’t handle an error (for example, if you’re reading some text from stdin in a simple program, you don’t want to try and recover from the OS deciding that console input isn’t available). It’s a conscious decision to crash if something exceptional happens.
I try to encourage people to use expect, because it gives a nicer error message.
When you can recover from an error, there are some nicer options. unwrap_or(default), map and similar can be nice, quick ways to handle “there isn’t a value here, or something didn’t work”.
The ? operator is really useful, but only if you are writing a function that returns a Result. You can make really nice function chains with do_this()?.do_that()? chains - but it only makes sense if you are returning a result and doing something with it.