Using ZIO just feels way different than using Cats. That's to say nothing of the fact that ZIO gives you typed errors and environment and lots of goodies that don't exist in other effect systems.
It's not marketing FUD. I'll give you several examples, sticking with ZIO because this is not a thread about ZIO Prelude (an experimental library aimed at pushing boundaries)
ZIO embraces variance everywhere, uses Any/Nothing, uses effect rotation (unlike Cats, Haskell, and pretty much everything else out there), doesn't use implicits, doesn't use names from category theory or abstract algebra, etc.