Of course they count, but they never reached Zig's expressivity/simplicity ratio. For example, Oberon doesn't have generics. You could argue that Zig doesn't have dynamic dispatch as part of the language, but it's expressive enough for that to be done in a library (https://github.com/alexnask/interface.zig). Put simply, Zig can do pretty much anything C++ can with the same expressivity (by programming languages X and Y having the same expressivity I mean that there is some small constant C such that any program in X could be written in Y in a number of lines that is within a factor of C compared to X).
Modula-2 and Oberon Pascal evolved to have generics, if that is the "expressiveness problem".
Also all the ones I mentioned, supported binary libraries, which apparently is not something the Zig folks are too keen in supporting, other than C like ABI.
For me any systems language that doesn't support binary library distribution isn't that relevant to me, and yes that is also something that I regularly complain about in Rust, and not only me. Microsoft has a talk on their Rust's adoption where this is mentioned as a problem, only relieved thanks to ubiquity of COM as mechanism to delivery binary libraries on Windows.
I agree that good separate compilation is valuable, but having a full ABI for natively-aot-compiled languages is rather difficult once generics are involved. Even C++ doesn't have one (and if you think about it, even C punts on separate compilation once macros are involved). I think the only such language that offers one -- and not quite to the full extent -- is Swift.
