zsh has this absolutely ridiculous case of feature shyness. It has tons of great features, which it goes to great lengths to hide from you for some indecipherable reason.
The reason is to preserve compatibility for everyone's configuration that they carefully built up over decades. It's quite hard to change things to enable some new thing without annoying many users. The last time that was tried was in the '90s and there are still zsh developers around who experienced the fallout. I value the fact that my shell doesn't change on me without warning like many GUI desktop environments.
In recent years the existence of frameworks like oh-my-zsh has contributed further to this situation because it has separated the detailed configuration from the base zsh project. It's a pity omz doesn't enable more really. Many things it does are not really useful unless you take the time to actually learn them. A lot of plugins just define aliases but if you don't know what they are, they just sit there unused.
I'm usually happy to put some effort into configuration upfront as a new user if it buys me the peace of mind that I won't be thrown under the bus later. OTOH, I recall some classmates being unaware that Vim supports syntax highlighting because the version that was installed on our lab computers didn't enable it by default (this was about five years ago), which also seems like a regrettable outcome.
