The tradeoff is between making sure you don't forget to write the cleanup call (Rust, C++) and making sure you don't forget to read the cleanup call (Zig). For low-level code I personally prefer Zig's tradeoff; others prefer the C++/Rust tradeoff.
I think it’s a good compromise, because the consequences of forgetting it are way harsher. Memory leaks, deadlocks…
And easier to detect. Knowing that no operation is carried out unless you can see it is important to many who do low-level programming.
But there is no one right answer. Differences between programming languages, including those between Zig and Rust, are mostly about people's personal preferences because language designers rarely make choices that are universally inferior than others. When they differ, it's because both sides are reasonable and have their proponents.
In Zig you need to call everything explicitly, meaning in the function you need to call what you want to be executed, no other code will run. The decision if you want some cleanup logic is made at the point of usage, not by the type itself.
That is the point of it, you look at a function and directly see what happens right there, not in other files/packages.
It is clear when it is called, but you have to check in code you are not currently seeing as any type could implement it. May seem like a minor thing, but is not explicit at the point of usage. In Zig only code you call explicitly runs, meaning if there is no defer nothing happens at the end of the scope.