People go far too heavily into trying to find parallels for characters in my view. I blame Naruto.
Zoro and Rayleigh are the sword wielding right hand men of the Pirate King. To that extent, yes, I suppose there is a parallel. But there's been no indication in the story that we've to see Zoro as the second coming of Rayleigh, certainly not the way that Luffy is clearly the second coming of Roger. Nobody's inherited Ray's will that we know of. If anything I'd say the existence of Zoro and Rayleigh is actually just another parallel for Luffy and Roger- they had similar, but not too similar, right hand men.
It's like the Luffy/Kid/Law = Roger/Whitebeard/Shiki thing. Never made any sense because the existence of Blackbeard had to be totally ignored. We've also learned that Shiki was not one of the top three pirates of his generation with the Rocks stuff. And Kid and Law had next to nothing in common with Whitebeard and Shiki other than being "opponents" for the Pirate King- and let's be totally honest, Kid and Law are more allies than opponents for Luffy. But people wanted to push parallels, so that's what we got.
Zoro and Rayleigh are the sword wielding right hand men of the Pirate King. To that extent, yes, I suppose there is a parallel. But there's been no indication in the story that we've to see Zoro as the second coming of Rayleigh, certainly not the way that Luffy is clearly the second coming of Roger. Nobody's inherited Ray's will that we know of. If anything I'd say the existence of Zoro and Rayleigh is actually just another parallel for Luffy and Roger- they had similar, but not too similar, right hand men.
It's like the Luffy/Kid/Law = Roger/Whitebeard/Shiki thing. Never made any sense because the existence of Blackbeard had to be totally ignored. We've also learned that Shiki was not one of the top three pirates of his generation with the Rocks stuff. And Kid and Law had next to nothing in common with Whitebeard and Shiki other than being "opponents" for the Pirate King- and let's be totally honest, Kid and Law are more allies than opponents for Luffy. But people wanted to push parallels, so that's what we got.