And why do you think Zig (and Odin, but I'm not really familiar with that one) is not comparable in complexity to C? If you start with C, replace the preprocessor language with the host language, replace undefined behavior with illegal behavior (panics in debug builds), add different pointer types for different types of pointers (single object pointers, many object pointers, fat many object pointers (slices), nullable pointers), and make a few syntactic changes (types go after the names of values in declarations, pointer dereference is a postfix operator, add defer to move expressions like deallocation to the end of the scope) and write a new standard library, you pretty much have Zig.