I can tell you a bit about my own experience, as I've I used Rust for two years, but have now transitioned to Zig. I started working on a modular synthesis engine, and I realized that Javascript wouldn't give me the granular control I needed. So I decided to use Rust. This was my first foray into low level programming, so learning Rust first was great because I internalized their ownership rules. However, I started to realize that Rust was doing quite a bit of stuff behind my back, like freeing objects when dropped, or making allocations when I inserted an item. This is a big no-no for realtime programming, and Rust didn't help me understand what was happening. It was then that I read matklad's blog post on rust hard mode,
https://matklad.github.io/2022/10/06/hard-mode-rust.html. I looked at some of his other blog posts too, and saw Zig. So Zig had been in the back of my mind for a while, when I decided to port a Tcl interpreter to Zig. I've been about 7 months in now making my own interpreter, and it's been a delightful language. Yes, I've had my share of memory leaks and double frees, but the debugging trace lets me capture a stack track at each reference count increment and decrement, so I'm able to hunt them down pretty well. I'm also hyper aware of memory layout and allocation failure, because allocation is fallible in Zig. The error union handling makes it pretty easy to propagate OOM though, so it's not hard to make code that's resilient to OOM. If I had tried to make this in Rust, I would have been fighting the standard library, ecosystem, and borrow checker constantly, because high level programming languages have non-trivial ownership semantics, and a lot of optimizations like epoch based variable caching just don't play nicely with references as trees.