I dabbled a bit with SDL3 and Zig last year, and looking at GitHub - allyourcodebase/SDL: SDL ported to the Zig build system. · GitHub, the required build.zig stuff does not look to be 2000 lines at all. What did you mean by that?
(Btw - following along Handmade Hero using the win32 API from Linux is not too bad either. I burned myself out at an earlier attempt trying to follow along using a different API and language.)