I'd say my (basic) understanding of Zig has actually helped me better understand C, since its semantics around pointer operations and allocation are a lot more explicit and intuitive; it's really helped make things "click" for me. Plus, the build system is infinitely better than I've seen from any native-compiled language, period.

Those two factors make me think it's close to the ideal language for newcomers to lower-level programming. Even the syntax ain't bad, as far as C-like syntax goes; it'd be interesting to see some alternative languages that put alternate syntaxes over Zig's semantics, though (and one of my New Year's Resolutions is to put together something to that effect, whether by transpiling to Zig or by (ab)using Zig's compile-time programming).