The twenty percent quoted is referring to the size of the compiled artifact (one assumes ELF or Mach-O).
Whether or not a language is verbose or obscure is very much about your coordinate system. Not unlike safety.
I think C is a reasonable zero for both things.
Zig is more succinct and safer than C while still being comparably ergonomic. Rust is (mostly) safer and more succinct than Zig while being dramatically less ergonomic (take it up with Wadler memory chads, no one likes affine types).
I like lean4, which is dramatically safer, more succinct, and more ergonomic than Rust.
But I can see why some would say it's a bit too succinct.
> Rust is (mostly) safer and more succinct than Zig while being dramatically less ergonomic
This is just your opinion.
Well, it's my opinion. But it's also the opinion of the broader functional programming community from 1993 to the present day. This notably includes the quite serious Haskellers who designed Rust for the highly specific and demanding requirements of the Servo rendering engine in ~2010. Being as my two parents in web browser layout optimizations were both filed in 2009 I took considerable interest.
It wasn't until 2014 that Orchard formalized the coeffect discharge calculus via indexed monad that makes a binary ownership semantic irretrievably sunsetted as a degenerate case.
It's my opinion. I'm not concerned about how informed that opinion is.