Well, to look at it optimistically, it's meant as a foundational language, to take over the role C still has today, of being the only true glue language that can underlie all the others. If Zig can actually take over that function, then it will be a major upgrade to the ecosystem, even though it will never be the language of choice for most projects.
Despite all my bashing regarding C, I would rather keep C around with a standard -fhardening, -fsafe, or whatever, with similar constraints, enabling enums without implicit numeric conversions, standard library types for arrays and strings, no decays of arrays into pointer.
Probably more than enough if we leave C as a kind of portable Assembler role, to be used as much as Assembly is, and leave everything else to safer managed languages.
A model just like UNIX authors themselves have applied when creating Inferno with Limbo, with the learnings of UNIX and Plan 9.
Not a fan of @, !, .{ } all over the place, or the struct based imports that look like Javascript require() instead of a proper module system.