I see where you're coming from.

Many languages support the ternary operator, where it would be:

  foo = y ? x : z

Which "feels better" but I think that's because I learned ternaries first.

Some languages like Rust and Kotlin do support assignment of an if statement like

  foo = if (y) { x } else { z }

And I think that's a good step, as it doesn't need to introduce new syntax, just allows assignment of "blocks"

Yes. It requires that `if else` can be used as expressions, which for some reason in most languages that can not.

In the beginning of doing Rust I was missing the ternary operator, but now I couldn't care less.

    foo = if y { x } else { y }

Works well :-)