Presenting only one side of argument (only pros, no cons, etc.) is deceptive and dishonest. The fact that they were incredibly focused on build time in Zig and didn't even talk about it as a tradeoff going to Rust is very telling.
(The one reference I found to Rust’s compile times is them talking about how they had to split their Rust rewrite into 100 crates. A plain reading of this is the opposite of what you’re saying: they’re pointing out that Rust’s compile times are slower, but that this wasn’t an overriding negative.)
(Surely a relatively bland technical criticism of Zig - one that gets couched with praise - does not count as “a big fuss.”)
Literal quote (and again, appeared in the original article as well). Forking the compiler to try to get faster compile times is a significant effort that absolutely counts as raising a fuss.
I also don’t think that forking the compiler is a big fuss. Large companies do that all the time, to carry whatever patches they haven’t upstreamed yet (or can’t). It’s really not that big of a deal.