> But Zig does not eliminate them, but rather it might catch them at runtime

So does Rust. That's what we mean by eliminating them. Zig/Rust will panic, but you won't get a vulnerability.

> The difference here is that Rust promises that it will detect them at compile time, long before I ship my code.

No, Rust doesn't guarantee catching spatial-memory-safety violations at compile-time. Neither do Java, Python, or JS/TS, by the way.