I’m of the firm “no magic zombies” camp.

If the zombies aren’t magic, they aren’t going to last long, whichever form of zombie they are. Wait inside a few days, most of them should be dead or immobile.

If a zombie loses blood, they aren’t going to keep walking, their muscles won’t work without blood.

If you have a strong door, zombie arms will break before the door breaks.

Dehydration. Organisms need water to function at all, let alone move, and zombies aren’t big on water fountains.

I see zombies as dangerous for a few days, with their senses failing so they can’t track you effectively for the majority of the outbreak, then it’s over.

Anything other than that scenario is a magical zombie, who can move without energy, function without a body, or unrealistically mutate.

I love zombie movies and comics, but for real real, no magic zombies.

What about a subtler zombie pathogen that merely rewires your brain to make you allergic to everything but meat. It would have longer to spread, and the increase in consumption would probably cause a general environmental collapse.

You’d have aspects of cannibalism, societal collapse, and dramatic infection deceit scenes and nobody would ever look like a zombie.

People would have to publicly eat plants to prove they’re not zombies to enter secure areas. Remember the time Arby’s made a fake carrot that was made of meat? They called it a megetable. That’s real. What if the infected wormed their way into the food industry and started mislabeling things to muddy the waters due to social stigma?

Scientific zombies wouldn’t necessarily look dead, and a real version would be way less overt.

there are a few big issues here.

The consistency and efficacy of that pathogen

those people wouldn’t be zombies, they would just be carnivores.

if cannibalism/societal colapse/megetables are going on, people are going to notice.

there are already pathogens that make someone vegetarian, but because of the resilience of the human body, the effect only takes hold in a very low percentage of people introduced to the pathogen (they’re not sure which mechanism in tick spit prompts the meat allergy yet, afaik).

The brain is incredibly complex and can rewire itself, so to have even 10% of the population have consistently perfectly rewired brains while maintaining all other normal functions and the coordination to conspire, cannibalize people and change the global food supply is a pretty magical scenario.