I agree. I have been using Zsh since about early 1993. I went through a pretty thorough "first I'll convert to tcsh!" then "to Bash!" then "to Zsh!" evaluation back then and Zsh was absolutely the clear winner.
While Bash has "caught up" some in the ensuing decades by copying features (some poorly as you note), I think it still misses quite a few nice "usability" features. I've listed some here [1] from memory, but I am probably forgetting other pretty nice ones. Like maybe ${(f)"$(mycmd)"} to split the output of `mycmd` strictly by newlines. (or ps:\0: for even stricter splitting).
Do you know why "bash does [these things] natively"? Because zsh had them 20 years ago when bash was barebones and people were envious and over time bash started copying these features over. Sometimes poorly.
And for the "one line alias", in a bunch of cases it's with additional commands, which are not always available, the most famous example being rename.
Which rename? The binutils one (I think) or the Perl one (which has more features)?
Does your distro even package both?
Things can be a lot more complex than they seem.