Zig might get away with it by restricting itself to a narrow niche where this kind of simplicity is advantageous. Go tries to eat a much larger piece of the pie, and the deficiency is felt more as a result.
There's a profound wisdom to knowing the niche you're in, and Zig does seem to have that. The applications part of the stack is saturated with options, all trying to encroach on each other, but when it comes to the genuinely low-level, unsexy stuff...the viable options are all pretty old languages, and languages that patch over those old languages.
And with respect to discussion of boilerplate, you can, of course, always have a "Zig++" language that patches over Zig. By cutting out its own metaprogramming functionality, it's much more straightforward to generate useful Zig source. There are a lot of advantages to restraint in the design, and Go does share that, too.
