It was a joke premised on the implicit assumption that Zig must be an "anti-Rust" because it came later. Maybe you could call different approaches contrarian if Rust had achieved some great popularity or consensus, but it hasn't. Rust's adoption rate is low because many don't find it enticing enough, and so it's unsurprising that there are several other approaches in the space of low-level programming - which is due for some update - that are all different from each other. Their attempts to improve on C and C++ in different ways don't make them "anti" anything else.