Maybe we do desire it- I’m certainly not worried about using a niche language. I would argue a niche language is only a bad thing in scenarios where an old project using such a language needs revival, and the language is hard to use. COBOL comes to mind but it certainly wasn’t a niche language, PHP and Javascript are similarly widely used but terribly difficult to produce good code with.
And what does being on top get Zig? What does it get us as users? It’s already free! Let’s suppose Zig is #1 worldwide, best language hands down, used for every project- as a Zig programmer I’d be a little happier, in some (or most) projects. Even then why wouldn’t I use the right tool for the job, I’d certainly prefer writing bash scripts for bash-like problems.
Speaking as just a Zig user, I have no experience chatting with/about the inner workings or with project management. What follows is speculation!
Stable donations might help, I’ve mentioned before but more money often does not make projects quicker, but I would trust the Zig Foundation after that one interview with Jetbrains.
I think good tooling would help. For example Github’s stability declining and policy changes made for a bad host. Migrating probably helped in the long run, but it surely did slow things down with huge project-management changes, just a lot of extra work because of one company’s mistakes. Another example of good tooling would be incremental compiling, faster compiling pretty directly means faster iteration and less flow-state breaks.