It’s just a feeling, man.

Having to introduce a new language stack to distributioms just to be able to build a terminal emulator is what I would consider over-engineering.

So anything that uses a less popular language is considered over engineering? Distros support lots of different languages already and there are likely other packages built with zig already.

A 50-ish MB build time dependency that doesn't need any special privileges or installation to run? That's over engineering? A binary release of just CMake is bigger than all of Zig.