> Rolling out the above changes went relatively smoothly until one of the curious engineers on our network team found that compression was actually a bottleneck on high bandwidth connections

Back in the early-to-mid-aughts there was a push to start gzip-ing server responses.

It was my general experience at the time that this actually often made the browsing experience worse. Whereas without compression the page would begin to render as the html began to trickle in (very slow internet back then), when compressed you had to wait for the entire document to download and be decomposed first.

Uncompressed you could often decide if the page was worth waiting for entirely before it finished downloading.