I see you have a blog - it would be interesting if you wrote up the results of your thought process, whichever way you decide in the end.
As a PL nerd, I really enjoy reading well-informed takes from people who have seriously used a language as to its strengths and weaknesses.
I've been also very skeptical about Rust in the past, and all my points still hold (traits vs. accidental complexity, no introspection, barely usable macros, borrow checker awkward to use with arenas, orphan rule) but what's changed is that I won't be writing any of that myself, and LLMs are good in generating all sorts of glue and they are incredibly good at figuring out what's wrong, they just never get tired. so lots of Zig benefits are simply not relevant IMO.
one extra thing - Zig doesn't have interfaces, we often use comptime duck-typing and it works great, until it doesn't. it's not common but when you hit such case, it really sucks. I've realized that during my `serde` rabbit-hole and I had to revert the whole feature and scratch it. it was not obvious to me when I started but it's now clear to me that Rust really is higher-level PL than Zig. another example is Zig IO, I think it's screaming for interfaces, yet Zig is trying to pull all sorts of awkward hacks just to avoid it. it's sort of like when Go was avoiding generics but we all knew it's inevitable.
my current theory about Rust is that it might be bearable for my sorts of projects, given specific code guidelines. sort of like people writing C-style C++.