One advantage is that unknown makes it clear at a glance where the unsafe cast is happening, and forces devs to do it in a reasonable place (rather than letting `any` propagate through the code accidentally).

Personally though, I think vscode should have a feature to automatically highlight `any` variables is TS code, which would serve roughly the same purpose.

As another commenter mentioned, this is much better when using something like Zod to do the cast safely.