It's like how the novelty of the iPhone's touchscreen design was in not having a keypad, or that the novelty of the spork wasn't in inventing the functionality of either the spoon or the fork, but in having a single utensil that performs both. The more important aspect isn't the functionality but the design. I'm not saying you need to like any of these designs, but they are novel.
Saying that you could have a similar functionality by other means misses the point as much as saying that there's nothing special about a spork because if you have a spoon and a fork, then you have the same functionality. But you still don't have a spork.
You could, then, ask what the point of the novel design is. Well, in some languages you have generics and interfaces and compile-time expressions, but because none of these is general and powerful enough, so you also have macros. Macros are very powerful - perhaps too powerful - but they are difficult to understand, so they're used sparingly even if they can subsume other functionality.
Zig has shown that you can do almost anything you would reasonably want to do with macros with partial evaluation that has access to reflection. That wasn't obvious at all. And because that feature was not only powerful enough to subsume other features and make them redundant, but also very simple and easy to understand, it ended up with a design that is both minimal and easy to read (which is important for code reviews) but also highly expressive. Again, you don't have to like this rather minimalistic design, but it is novel.
Please show an example of Zig partial evaluation.
Again, the novel use of partial evaluation in Zig is that it eliminates generics, interfaces, and macros. Therefore, any language that has one or more of these features does not have this novel design.
I mean a simple example. Just to illustrate the concept. Like the examples I provided here:
It's like saying the the iPhone design wasn't novel except for the fact that prior art all had a keypad. But the design was novel in that it was intended to eliminate the keypad. Zig's comptime feature is novel in that it exists to eliminate interfaces, generics, and macros, and you're bringing up a language that eliminates none of them.
So D clearly isn't an example, but perhaps there's some other language I haven't heard of. Just out of curiosity, can a printf in D not only check types at compile time but also generate formatting code while still allowing for runtime variables and without (!!!) the use of string mixins? Like I said, it's possible there's precedent for that (even though it isn't the distinguishing feature), and I wonder if D is that. I'm asking because examples I've seen in D either do use string mixins or do not actually do what the Zig implementation does.