Claude is significantly better at rust than zig. Zig is changing all the time. If you check my profile comments I did a quick experiment recently to demonstrate. Essentially, Claude could generate a basic working tcp echo server in a few seconds. For zig, either asking it to do it just with zig, or with specific versions (.15 and .16 because some fundamental language changes necessitate different implementations) failed to produce working code in all three cases and also took magnitudes longer to generate the code.
Aside from the big marketing play, Claude not being able to easily generate zig code was probably a big motivator - it doesn’t make anthropic look good and it doesn’t fit into how they’re doing things
Also, you’re assuming that actual traditional maintainers even exist now. Likely it’s a smaller team of people running mythos agents with an unlimited budget and no real need to fully understand the code