Not when one isn't against the use of managed languages in systems programming, like Swift, D, C# (AOT), Nim, OCaml or oldies that lost the language wars from the 90's, like Modula-3, Oberon, Component Pascal,...
Lots of people are against that, though. Clearly. I agree that it's silly sometimes (I dearly wish OCaml or something like it was mainstream), but the implicit definition of the category that rust, zig, etc are competing in is non-managed languages.
The only point is that it's not weird for Zig to compare itself to Rust.
Right, however Zig is late to the party, its approach to safety is like using Modula-2 or Object Pascal.
Also, not only it is hard to see which big corp would make using Zig unavoidable, AI driven programming makes most languages irrelevant, it is a matter to ask what flavour should be output be.
Which is like, why are we even arguing for manual memory management, when is the LLM doing the work.
The only point is that it's not weird for Zig to compare itself to Rust.