I think because of the forces I talked about above we experience a repeating progression step in programming languages:

- we have a language with a particular philosophy of development

- we discover that some concept A is awkward to express in the language

- we add a special case to the language to make it nicer

- someone eventually invents a new base language that natively handles concept A nicely as part of its general model

Lisp in some sense skipped a couple of those progressions: it had a very regular language that didn't necessarily have a story for things that people at the time cared about (like static memory management, in the guise of latency). But it's still a paragon of consistency in a usable high-level language.

I agree that it's of course not correct to say that Zig is a descendent or modern equivalent of Lisp. It's more that the virtue that Lisp embodies over all else is a universal goal of language design, just one that has to be traded off against other things, and Zig has managed to do pretty well at it.