Rust is definitely different (and calmer imho) on bare metal. That said (as much of a Rust fanboy I am), I also enjoy Zig.

Yep! We've entered a grey areas, where some Rust embedded libs are expanding the definitions of memory safety, and what the borrow checker should evaluate beyond what you might guess. Eg, structs that represent peripherals, that are now checked for ownership; the intent being to prevent race conditions. And Traits being used to enforce pin configuration.