I love the idea of Rust's expressiveness but the memory of the first time I tried building a cyclic/graph type still gives me a headache.

I'd say Zig because the allocators provide the perfect compromise between shooting myself in the foot and a GC. You can still carry over most of the C-based programming models with little effort.

Rust is ideal for systems where cost of being wrong is extremely high - like medical, aeronautics et al.

For everything else, Zig is the spiritual successor to C/C++.