You seem to forget all the cases in Java where you didn't expect null to happen, but for some reason something was null and you get a NPE. Sure, if you check all values for null already the difference to now is not very big, but no one I know does this. Everyone has some intuition whether something "can" be null or not. Rust (and other languages without null) formalize the notion of "this cannot be null", so you don't have to depend on your intuition anymore - and cannot be wrong about it.

Regarding unwrap: If you tell the compiler "I know what I'm doing" and you don't know what you are doing then no one can help you. It's the same as putting casts everywhere when the compiler yells at you about incompatible types: If you lie to the compiler it will do your bidding, but your code will run into errors at runtime that you could have prevented at compile time. Again: No one can help you here.