What are your shell options? `(#i)zzz` gets me a "zsh: no matches found" if such a file does not exist. So I suspect you have `nullglob` set. In which case, `(#i)zzz` expands to nothing because there's no match. Whereas `zzz` by itself is _not a glob_, so the option has no effect; it is passed unchanged to `ls`, which then notices that it doesn't exist.
4 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 4 % ls -AFrGgdt
zzz
ls: cannot access 'zzz': No such file or directory
4 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 4 % ls -AFrGgdt (#i)zzz
drwxr-xr-x 16 20480 Apr 9 10:38 ./
I'm expecting the (#i) to test for case, but it seems to send
something to 'ls' even when there's no match. Pretty trivial
issue, but can that be fixed? I mean so that ls would report No
such ... ? I think I recall a similar issue years ago and that
there was a fix.