I understand this sentiment exactly, and your thoughts/analysis were near identical to my own, though you managed to articulate them better than I could have.
I do not for a moment believe that the author wrote the article in bad-faith, quite the opposite, they seemed to truly approach the subject in the most neutral way they could. That said, the impression that I got from their conclusion and many of their criticisms (a few of which are valid) could be reduced to down to “Zig is not Rust”, which they view as a negative against the language.
As you stated, I am unsure if this is their bias for Rust, my own for Zig, or a mixture of both, but it was the impression that I walked away with after reading the article. I understand the perspective of the author was one coming from the Rust world, but in my opinion, the entire article could be summarized with the following bullet-points:
- Pros: Zig is like Rust in these ways. It also has arbitrary-sized numbers.
- Cons: Zig is not like Rust in these ways