I guess we could summarise Rust's and Zig's core design hypotheses as follows: Even though both place the same emphasis on correctness, Rust doesn't compromise on memory safety (which, given what empirical data we do have, is an important component of correctness but certainly not equivalent to it), i.e. it adds all the sound language features needed to provide it, even at the cost of language complexity, while Zig doesn't compromise on language simplicity, i.e. it adds all the sound language features needed to provide memory safety up to the point they impact language complexity. I don't discount the possibility that there might be a language that could be safer than Zig yet less complex than Rust, or perhaps even as soundly-safe as Rust and as simple as Zig, but so far I haven't seen such a language.
Barring any empirical data, we cannot say which, if any, of those two approaches leads to better correctness (where by "better" I mean reaching the desired level of correctness needed for most low-level applications more cheaply), so we both lean on "ideology," where I prefer simplicity whereas you prefer sound guarantees — both of us in the name of correctness. I think we agree that both C and Idris are the wrong paths to correctness, but while we might reasonably disagree on the price we should pay for soundness, placing Zig's memory-safety in the same category as C's is just as exaggerated and misleading as placing Rust's soundness in the same category as Idris's.
By the way, I wouldn't at all be surprised if empirical research ends up finding no significant differences in correctness between the two, and, in fact, would guess it to be the most likely outcome given our inability to find significant bottom-line differences between "reasonable" same-generation languages so far.
