There's also ZIL by way of ZILF https://github.com/taradinoc/zilf This is the Lisp-like language that Infocom implementers actually used back in the day.
It's still pretty good. TADS is a more modern alternative, and the one I would go with, but basically these haven't been commercially viable products since the 80s so there's not a lot going into it.
Arguably, the right answer now is to document everything that matters to you about the adventure, and tell an LLM to run it.
Yes, very easy to grasp and games will be much lighter than Inform7. Tads it's propietary even if the interpreters are free. Inform6 has the whole stack (even free documentation too), from Inform Beginner's Guide to these, where you have libre games for Inform6 and some free as in freedom
related documentation of Inform6 internals.
It seems to often make it hard to get back where you were, like you go west and then east and end up in a different place. I don't know enough about z-machines to tell why.
It has been a while since I've played interactive fiction, so I can't make a specific suggestion, but modern games seem to be better at keeping the directions consistent (or at least providing clues when they are not). As others have noted, older games broke directionality to serve as puzzles -- failing to acknowledge that some people have a sense of direction while following twisty paths!
Newer games also tend to follow some quality of life rules in their design, things like avoiding arbitrary deaths and avoiding situations where the player cannot progress because they missed something earlier in the game.
Not ZMachine related, not even with Inform6, where n_to, s_to and w_to e_to are pretty much self-explanatory. It's just that Dungeon/Zork/Zork-I-II-III were made that way.
Arguably, the right answer now is to document everything that matters to you about the adventure, and tell an LLM to run it.
It would write the book ahead of you, kind of like how railroads could send trains with supplies out to the track as it was built.
https://jxself.org/git/
Newer games also tend to follow some quality of life rules in their design, things like avoiding arbitrary deaths and avoiding situations where the player cannot progress because they missed something earlier in the game.