This was a deliberate design decision by andrew for all zig pre-1.0 to supress discussions about coding style (use CR, LF, CRLF, LFCR as a line ending? tabs vs. spaces? ...) as it's considered bike shedding
Zig 1.0 won't have this restrictions anymore. More information can be found here:
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/FAQ#why-does-zig-force-m... https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/544
You're demanding 1.0+ usability from a language that's has yet to stand up on its own feet and is currently, unsurprisingly, 0.6.0 and won't be 1.0 any time soon because there's a massive amount of work that needs to be done.
This also isn't C and it wasn't developed/maintained for past 50 years.
None of the backwards rationalizations people give actually makes sense, especially since it literally breaks any "hello world" program on windows. It's insane that people would try so hard to make excuses for such a basic disregard for new people.
Think about the reverse. Let's say tabs are treated as spaces and carriage return bytes are ignored. Who would ever argue that something should be changed to break these things?
The result is that by default you get errors on windows with hello world programs. People will tell you to just change your defaults in your text editor to not write carriage returns. There seems to be a lot of rationalizations from a very unpragmatic choice.