I'm not a Rust advocate. I'm a "the whole debate is silly: 99% of the time you want a high level language with a garbage collector" advocate.

What's the use case for Zig? You're in that 1% of projects in which you need something beyond what a garbage collector can deliver and, what, you're in the 1% of the 1% in which Rust's language design hurts the vibe or something?

You can also get that "safer, but not Safe" feeling from modern C++. So what? It doesn't really matter whether a language is "safer". Either a language lets you prove the absence of certain classes of bug or it doesn't. It's not like C, Zig, and Rust form a continuum of safety. Two of these are different from the third in a qualitative sense.