We have the tech today for even wildly better compression, at least for natural looking images. Using neural nets. There is a big computational cost to them, but if history is any guide, that won't be an issue forever.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/ai-gaugan-app-painting-neura...
The neural network basically has a huge lookup table of "natural" looking stuff. Just point into that table and get what you want out of it: grass, trees, a crowd, etc and the NN will produce it to your specifications.