>a language with often comparable performance that is ALSO much safer

There are domains where performance is critical and safety isn't so important (e.g. video games). Zig has an advantage in such domains because of the pervasive support for passing around allocators in the standard library (avoiding hidden allocations, and allowing efficient memory reuse via block allocators), while in the Rust stdlib custom allocators are relatively cumbersome to use (and not easy to prove safe to the compiler).