> has to pull in a whole programing language stack just for it

That’s implying a lot more than I think is the case for Zig.

Zig itself is a very lean and independent executable. It’s just one binary. Statically linked on Linux I believe. It’s even moving toward removing LLVM dependence.

I don’t know of any other language that aims to be as portable as Zig, including C itself. Of course, not all of those goals have been realised yet, but at this stage I don’t think there’s much preventing portability from Zig’s part itself, other than more architectures supported in its own compiler backend. And I suppose a 1.0 release would make it easier to get the compiler more widely distributed.