This is pretty close to saying Rust is not very different than C because it has the unsafe keyword. That is, either an ignorant (of Zig) or disingenuous statement.
If you believe I mischaracterized zig, please enlighten me what I got wrong specifically rather than attacking my ad hominem
Arguing about whether certain static analysis should be opt in or opt out is just extremely uninteresting. It’s not like folks are auditing the unsafe blocks in their dependencies anyways.
If you want to talk about actual type system issues that’s more interesting.
The proof is in the pudding. TigerBeetle despite having a quite opinionated style still almost hit by UB and basically got lucky it wasn’t a worse failure. By contrast, even though unsafe isn’t audited for all dependencies, it does in practice seem to make UB extremely unlikely. And there’s work ongoing in the ecosystem to create safe abstractions to remove existing unsafe into well tested and centralized things
There is no point throwing it all away to get back to the starting line.