[bobajeff]

>Whether Kotlin or some other language (Zig?) gets more popular for native development is of course an open question

I don't see how Kotlin and Zig are comparable for native development. Maybe electron/nodejs, Swift or C#.

How much is Kotlin even being used outside of Android these days?

As far as I'm aware Kotlin has no plans for anything meant to address embedded or kernel programming.

So I don't think it's as much of a open question currently.