I can say that something is "table stakes" for me without demanding that everyone else adhere to my values.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "universal value", but I would say to be "table stakes" (i.e. not optional), it has to have overwhelming value. I think outside some fairly niche areas (e.g. programs that don't process untrusted data at all), it very very clearly has overwhelming value.

Now you might argue that the other features of Zig, like `defer`, are so good that they reduce the chance of memory errors and therefore memory safety has less value for Zig. But that seems highly dubious to me, especially for use-after-free. I guess we'll find out when Zig has more widespread use.