> Zig is well on its way to a third path with potentially the same level of safety

No. Zig says it wants to get to where Fil-C is, for a specific release mode that most people won't use, and it doesn't have even an outline of how that would work.

That's nowhere close to the "same level of safety" as (safe) Rust or Java has. We're going to see all the same bugs and all the same excuses as before.