They defer all very real issues caused by their approach as being problems for others to solve (wine, antiviruses, users, even microsoft). That's such a weird level of hubris.

I think the only place where avoiding win32 is desirable is to write drivers, but zig already has support for some level of bare-metal development and I'm sure a package can provide shims to all ntdll utilities for that use-case.

I think it's pretty clear that they're doing it because it's a more fun challenge. As a low-level developer myself, I agree that using the lowest-level API possible is fun, especially if it's poorly documented and you have to try to try to preemptively mitigate breakage! But this is no mentality to have when you're writing a language ecosystem...