It is insane and you are completely right. This has been a part of programming for over 50 years. Unfortunately you aren't going to get anywhere with zig zealots, they just get mad when confronted with things like this that have no justification, but they don't want to admit it's a mistake.
But even the solutions would be so trivial - have a separate 'prod' compiler flag. With that, make these errors, without make these warnings.
Problem solved, everyone happy.