(1) The original zig code was probably heavily AI coded with lower quality, hence the bag. There is a chance that a full rewrite in zig might do as well but we will never find out.

(2) The rewrite itself is a massively successful marketing move. It shows what Claude code can do and how little it costs compared to human engineering. But the question remains whether someone else, not knowing zig, rust, and TypeScript can pull this off.