I wonder if this is much smaller than using one character claims and regular http transport deflate/gzip compression.
If you talk about claim names, they basically aim to be short. For instance, claims defined in RFC7519 Section 4.1 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7519#section-4.1) are only 3 characters long. As explained in the same section:
"All the names are short because a core goal of JWTs is for the representation to be compact."