> At some project scale the language really stops being any limiting factor
That's not entirely true. At a certain scale, some languages start becoming increasingly more of a factor. Memory issues in C/C++ codebases, for example. This is pretty well established at this point, which is why there's a push to move away from memory-unsafe languages. Which likely would include Zig, for better or worse.
I agree that new software should avoid memory unsafe languages, but I would disagree that rewriting existing projects in a memory safe language at all cost is a universally good idea.
But you just shifted the claim to "at all cost".
What if there isn't much cost? What if the benefits outweigh the cost?
I mean... the token cost alone on this thing...