I think Colin's a rad programmer, he works on EdgeDB which is absolutely my favorite datastore I've ever used and I think Zod's fine if you want to use it. But

I think Colin's a rad programmer, he works on EdgeDB which is absolutely my favorite datastore I've ever used and I think Zod's fine if you want to use it. But I don't agree with your premise. I don't, in practice, find the way Zod asks you to think about data compelling. It's probably because I think specifically in communication between systems; making the particulars of the interchange format central to the act of writing the thing, for me, keeps top-of-mind the necessity of both ends having an identical understanding of the allowable semantics. (Similarly, I've never used any Typebox features that don't map to JSON Schema, and I've never felt the need to.)