It's not that they think zig will avoid the issues, but rather that the cost required to do so is too great, so they would rather have a nicer language with more traditional ways to catch those bugs. If things like memory tagging continue to take off, hardware will catch these issues anyways. I don't personally agree but they are allowed to have their opinions.

More than memory safety, I do think thread safety is a bigger challenge I'd love more modern languages to tackle.