It may be easy to do memory management, but it's not too easy to detect if you've made a fatal mistake when such mistakes won't cause apparent defects

avoiding all memory management mistakes is not easy, and the bigger the codebase becomes, the more exponential the chance for disaster gets

Absolutely, big factor is undefined behavior which makes it look like everything works. Until it doesn't. I quit C long ago because I don't want to deal with manual memory management in any language. I was overwhelmed by Zigs approach as well. Rust is pretty much the only language making it bearable to me.