Many programmers think of the programming world as: "assembly < C < everything else", and that is a misconception that was actually quite easy to "learn" if one wasn't ready to invest a lot of time in looking for more options.

When I see someone saying that they prefer D/Nim/Zig value proposition as a "better C" than Rust, what I see is that people are just starting to realize that there are many more options than C for doing programming tasks that require a more precise interaction with the hardware.

It's just not "assembly", but there are multiple different assemblers with different trade-offs. It's also not "assembler < C" anymore, since in some aspects newer languages do offer more low level control about certain things than C.

It's also not just C/C++/Zig/Rust/Nim/D competing at the lowest-level of the space. Ada, Forth, Scheme, and many other languages are also widely used in this space. They just aren't the "next new thing".