My rule of thumb is that unchecked access is okay in scenarios where both the array/map and the indices/keys are private implementation details of a function or struct, since an invariant is easy to manually verify when it is tightly scoped as such. I've seen it used it in:

* Graph/tree traversal functions that take a visitor function as a parameter

* Binary search on sorted arrays

* Binary heap operations

* Probing buckets in open-addressed hash tables