I think that our community's equivalent of "where's my flying car?" is "where's my higher-level language?"
I've spent much of my career writing low-level code in low-level languages because I had to, usually in C and usually because I was in resource-constrained environments where tight control over CPU and memory footprints was necessary. There's absolutely room for languages that improve programmers' lives in that kind of environment while remaining suitable to that purpose. I'd put Zig in that category, and I find much to admire in it.
However, outside that domain, once you have even a little freedom from those constraints, it makes no sense to use a language designed around them. When even something as simple as manipulating a few strings or updating objects in a map/hash/dictionary requires careful attention to avoid memory leaks or excessive copying, and your code is doing those things a lot, you're using the wrong language. A language that "protects" you by guiding you toward adding the right boilerplate in the right places honestly isn't much of a help. Most code should be written in a truly higher level language, where things like circular references don't require much discussion except by the language implementors. The problem of how to do that without going full-GC and having to deal with pauses is where people should focus their attention, not more languages that just change which ceremony you must adhere to.
Low-level languages encourage the use of clean ownership patterns, which ultimately leads to cleaner design.
Maybe the authors of that code just had different priorities, such as maximising compilation time.