I love Scala because of this as well, and put up with the slow compile times and large runtime needed because I very much value that correctness. I get a lot of the same with Rust (and more, like data races being a compiler error), with the added bonus that so many of its abstractions are zero-cost.
The more I build software, the more I want strong type systems that I can lean on to help ensure correctness. Obviously that won't eliminate all bugs, but building reliable software on a deadline turns out to be really hard, and if a compiler can tell me I'm doing things wrong before it becomes an expensive mistake in production, that's worth the added effort it takes to write in a language that can help me in this way.
It seems like Zig is approaching it from the other side: a "better C". I don't really want a better C; I want a Scala that runs with the CPU and memory footprint of a C program. Rust is probably as close as I'll get to that.
Unfortunately I've found that a lot of developers -- especially senior ones -- don't want to learn anything new, and want to keep churning out the same overengineered, overabstracted, exception-oriented, mutable-spaghetti Java code, year after year. Reminds me of the saying that some senior developers have one year of experience, repeated ten times.