I believe the benefit of Zig is that it allows you the familiarity of writing code like in C, but has other elements in the language and tooling to make things safer. For example, Zig has optionals, which can eliminate nil deference. Another example is how you can pass some debug or custom allocators during testing that have all sorts of runtime checks to detect bad memory access and resource leaks.

I have some issues with Zig's design, especially around the lack of explicit interface/trait, but I agree with the post that it is a more practical language, just because of how much simpler its adoption is.