Gather/scatter have been around for a while, but it hasn't been until more recent Intel uarch that their cost makes them worth using in practice. Zen3 is still lagging quite a bit.
I personally would have never thought of making such an instruction, despite having written multiple sets of code that use a SIMD-compress or SIMD-expand pattern.
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Case in point, vpcompressb (byte-wise compress) is the most blatantly obvious way to "remove redundant XML whitespace" that I've ever seen.
Its just a thing that has obvious wide-spread applicability to many algorithms I've seen and keeps coming up again-and-again. Or determining which rays (in a raytracer) are "dead" vs "alive" (separating out hits vs misses). Or implementing quicksort (compress all items "less than pivot" to X array. Compress all items "greater than pivot" to a Y array. Quicksort done).