Python made the choice to sacrifice performance for much better readability, and it shows. You can see the difference between code elegance when working with strings in either languages, for example. The downside is that Python's benchmark numbers are poor. Rust can get to within 1x C's performance; Python would be lucky to get within 100x.
But I do share your concern about `unwrap`. Is it idiomatic to do `unwrap`s, or is it better to define functions to accept and return Option<xxx>?
Your main function is most likely pretty empty and that's the only place where you need to deal with hard failure. And that's the same in all languages. If you write in Python you don't just not handle exceptions either. Somewhere you catch them down and present them to the user in a good way.
But I do share your concern about `unwrap`. Is it idiomatic to do `unwrap`s, or is it better to define functions to accept and return Option<xxx>?