In 2015 ISO published a standard pertaining to zip archives, and one of the specifications was (from Wikipedia):
Archives may not span multiple volumes or be segmented.
Edit: I just found the page where you got your quote. Looks like ISO was deliberately defining a subset of ZIP.
$ tar cazf - file1 file2 | split -b 700m - out.tgz
> or copy it to multiple flash drives or CDs
How would you use 'split' without either dumping the whole archive on disk or pluggin all drives at the same time?
The options in gnu tar are -L and -M for specifying tape length (in KB) and creating multi-volume archives.
The -L version is handy as it can prompt you to change the "tape". It has built-in tape handling as well, if you are using a real tape that can be controlled via mt.
Apparently (just checked info) it supports an arbitrary command to execute at the end of each archive. That would be handy for burning CDs, though I don't remember that feature from when I used floppies or QIC-40 to move files from one machine to another.
Around 1991-ish I would use these options to put archives onto stacks of floppy disks. The floppies didn't have a filesystem, just blocks of tar archive. In the days of 9600 bps modems, this was often the fastest way to move stuff to another machine. I had an often-reused stack of 3.5in HD floppies labeled with numbers for this purpose.
The only way I've seen RAR used in torrents is to package everything into one big file, and since they're usually video or audio that already has lossy compression, and since I may want to prioritize or skip certain files, it's both pointless and annoying.