I believe the latest on zoned devices is that they are scrapping the explicit zone operations API and are letting the OS merely provide a "region hint", to sepa

I believe the latest on zoned devices is that they are scrapping the explicit zone operations API and are letting the OS merely provide a "region hint", to separate writes by the expected lifespan of the data stored. That could be as simple as different zfs datasets using different hints, if one dataset is archival and another contains actively-overwritten data.