Of all the modern systems level programming languages I’ve seen, I like Zig the most. It combines a powerful, modern type system (generics, algebraic data types, statically checked null references) with an impressive simplicity (e.g. without the productivity-consuming and mentally burdensome “borrow checker” of Rust).
The borrow checker also gives you memory safety, which Zig does not have at the moment.
Solving use-after-free and related issues is a hard problem. I have yet to see a way to solve it that doesn't boil down to one of runtime garbage collection, not allowing heap allocation at all, not freeing memory at all, or a region system/borrow checking. It's fine to not like the borrow checker, but it's there for a reason.
It comes with a steep learning curve though, and I remember giving up three times in two years when I decided to give Rust a try. It eventually clicked on the fourth attempt(Idk if the docs had evolved between the third or fourth time or if it's the result of the slow progress I made through the three first try) but now, I really happy with the language.