Programming languages take a long time to build. Zig is a more ambitious project than most. I see lots of progress in these release notes and I'm happy to "give a pass" for the fact that it's not finished.

No one's been giving passes bewildering or otherwise for sweeping issues under the rug, because that didn't happen. The 0.16 release notes are linking to plenty of GitHub issues. If you have additional information to post on an issue then you can copy it to Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/30027