I think Zig would do better than Go at things like kernels, drivers, game engines, lower level sorts of things. Edited to add the obvious: SPIR-V, for instance.
Of course there’s lots of programming that can afford to pay for GC side effects, if there weren’t we wouldn’t have invented GC, but it’s a little less universal, a little less ‘system’.
For me, I came to Zig after horrible cross-platform experiences led me to try going all the way back to C and I found that I was spending way too much time learning to deal with accidental complexity instead of essential complexity. (Respect to the C masters but I failed to adapt.)
My interpretation of what they said is closer to “we already improved compilation speeds by 4x and we did it without compromising our plans to go much further - also this PR introduces specific timing bugs.”
To your point though, if Rust is getting it done, go for it. A lot of people still write those in C though.