What Zig shares with C is orthogonality, with a large power-to-weight ratio, meaning it's a small language grammar with powerful range.

But Zig also improves on C's safety in many ways, not least checked arithmetic enabled by default in safe release modes, along with bounds checked memory accesses, function return values that cannot be ignored, checked syscall error handling, explicit allocations, comptime over macros, a short learning curve and remarkable readability.

It's hard for systems programmers not to appreciate any of these qualities in isolation.

Syntax is almost completely irrelevant.