Compiler Does't find defs.h and zconf.h

Sure. I’ve built with Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition, and all of the Audacity developers do.
The biggest problem that I had was getting the environment variable to stick, but once that was done it was just a matter of following the instructions.

Someone posted their steps here: Building 2.3 on Windows - #11 by Apesbrain
Also, read the posts after that one - a couple of points are clarified.