Ahura Mazda did not make evil.
This is the point of the whole system. Evil is not a test, not a permitted shadow and not part of a larger plan — it is an uncreated hostile intelligence that got in. The cost is that God is not omnipotent in the way later monotheisms would want; the benefit is that the problem of evil does not arise.
This is the tradition's distinctive contribution and it is a genuine philosophical position rather than a mythological quirk. Ahura Mazda is wholly good and did not create Angra Mainyu, who is uncreated, independent and hostile — so evil requires no explanation in terms of divine purpose, permission or pedagogy. The cost is a limitation on omnipotence: God is not the only ultimate, and the outcome of the conflict, while assured, is achieved through struggle in time rather than decreed. Later Zoroastrian theologians, especially in the Sasanian and post-conquest periods when they were arguing with Muslims and Christians, made this the centrepiece of their polemic: your God, they argued, is either the author of evil or powerless against it, and ours is neither. Western scholarship has spent two centuries arguing about whether the Gathas themselves are dualist in this sense or whether the sharp cosmic dualism is a later development, and the answer depends heavily on how one reads Yasna 30.
The same ground, other faiths
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