Something is wrong with the consistency of your arguments: either, typing efficiency is irrelevant and then ditching curly braces in favor of keywords is justified or typing efficiency is important and then curly braces are reasonable choice since they are just one character :)

Just curious: if you don’t like curly braces so much, then why do you promote Zig, which is typical C-family language in this regard? :)

P.S. In C you can use preprocessor to replace curly braces with BEGIN/END. I actually saw the entire application written in this style. It was ugly as for me, but YMMV.