If you have this reaction, perhaps you should take a humility lesson before claiming that a few syntax tricks is all it takes to outsmart people who spent their entire university careers thinking about these problems.
I don't think I have written anything of that sort. Thinking in OOP terms in, say, Java is great. Zig is not an OOP language though, and it cares about mapping nicely to CPU instructions more than it cares about mapping nicely to UML diagrams, so thinking in OOP terms in Zig is not that great, more often than not.
I've seen plenty of people coming into Zig expecting it to conform to their expectations towards object orientation or functional purity. Neither will be able to have a good time if they can't let go of their preconceptions.
How did you interpret this statement?
thinking in OOP terms in say, Haskell, is terrible. -> doesn’t mean OOP is terrible or that Haskell is terrible.
Thinking in functional terms in Haskell is great. -> doesn’t mean functional programming is great or that Haskell is great.
All it means is that the language is designed to be used with that paradigm.
Many of those "functional" features like LINQ, were already present in Smalltalk collections and CLU.
As for what inovations, OOPSLA, ECOOP, ACM, IEEE proceedings have plenty of research papers on the matter.