Same here, lots of large projects I worked didn't have any unsafe at all. It's a very niche feature, mostly for people doing very low-level stuff.
But I suspect this is survivorship bias. I only ever worked with very experienced developers when doing Rust. I'm pretty sure as soon as I start working with more inexperienced devs I'll start seeing a multitude of clever ways to bypass the borrow checker, similar to the cleverness I currently see them doing in other languages.
It's a feature that's necessary when dealing with FFI or when implementing containers. It's a tool, rather than a crutch to work around the borrow checker. In fact, unless one is using raw pointers everywhere, it's very impractical to use unsafe blocks to circumvent the borrow checker.
