> Zig is aiming to be lower level than Rust.

Zig and Rust are equivalently "low level". Zig isn't any closer to the hardware than Rust is.

> but I believe its advantage over Rust for that specific application is that you have tighter control over exactly when memory is allocated and deallocated, and how data is laid out in it.

Rust gives you all this, too.

Zig's primary (possibly only) advantage over Rust is that it has much faster compilation times.