Looking at that unicode PR, It seems like the thought process is "we don't want to spend time fixing unicode security regressions until we have stabilized the rest of the language", the unicode library is totally broken rn, don't fix a minor part of the problem.
There is no excuse, in my opinion. The PR would have taken a step in a safer direction, even if the entirety of it is scrapped at a later date. It wouldn't have broken anything else in the codebase, and it was a completed, merge-able change.
Again, the frustration wasn't just from the PR alone - it was also the Discord flame war that ensued prior to the PR.
While I'm not usually 100% happy with the Discord server (it currently has very little moderation and has had one user behave like a piece of shit for a long time) I've had a hard time finding the flame war you mention. I found the discussion about utf8 decoding and it seemed cordial, with two people agreeing with you and only one saying (paraphrasing...) "Fuck this, I'm leaving this community until people stop asking too much" (which didn't make much sense).
I usually find community overrated and I've made a conscious effort to separate it from technology for the most part. Zig as a language has certain values that it's built with in mind and those values for the most part are aligned with mine, so this is basically what keeps me interested in it. I would use Rust despite its community if it aligned with my values. I despise the leadership of Elixir and Phoenix but I still use both of those when it makes sense.
With all this said, the IRC channel is a lot less about memery and wild discussions (but also less active) than the Discord server, so if you feel like it you can always just pop into #zig on FreeNode if you have questions and would like to talk about the language.
