This is nice, but ... I wish the doc didn't introduce it as "a better cd command", that's very misleading.

With the exception of the fuzzy part, which can be added separately, Bash already has facilities for all of those functionalities.

The "remembering" part can be done via dirs/pushd/popd. The "using the basename only" part can be done via CDPATH. The "automated" remembering could be done via a super simple function wrapper over 'cd', adding things onto the the dirstack or the CDPATH respectively (and with a selection menu, possibly fuzzy, when clashes occur)

Putting it all together to achieve the same effect feels like a very simple 10-liner bash function at best.

Not dissing the author's work or idea, nor is there anything wrong with reinventing the wheel in another language for fun; but if you're going to claim that "z is a better cd" because it bundles all that other functionality for things that are unrelated to cd, and for which there are already pretty decent unix-philosophy-adhereing commands that you could be using effectively already, then if you fail to mention these things in your documentation, it feels a bit ignorant / disingenuous. I would have preferred examples with "without z you'd have to use CDPATH for this, and dirstack for that, and maybe this 5-line wrapper for the menu thing, etc".

Otherwise it feels a bit like saying "grep is a better ed" or something.

I think you're misunderstanding the authors intention. Fuzzy finding is the banner feature of zoxide, i.e., it's only a better cd because it includes that feature. Everything else is just the necessary table stakes features in order to make zoxide a viable cd alternative. E.g., it's not notable that zoxide copies the rest of the useful features from cd in Bash, because that's exactly what it would need to do in order to be a cd replacement.

What you could argue with is whether there's a point to replacing the cd built-in in order to include fizzy finding (personally I don't see the point of this either). But the reason all the other cd features are included is in order to make that viable.