It seems that part of what Zig is trying to do, though, is create a pit of success around these practices. So the response might be something like, “Yes you can do these things in modern C, but doing it consistently requires more discipline than we’d like.”
https://blog.codinghorror.com/falling-into-the-pit-of-succes...
I do not think it needs a lot of discipline. It needs the willingness to do it, but this is also true for adopting a different language.