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I don't agree with this. The whole point of tools like this, is that we don't live in age of dial up internet anymore, and haven't for a long time.

Back then you wanted maximum compression like XZ, because the slowest part of the process was the download. Now especially with XZ awful decompress rate, the slowest part is extract. In many cases it's better to have 9% larger size, for 500% increase in extract, like you get with ZST.

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Definitely there's a lot of workloads that are pure data-munging, where you don't want to store the whole bloated JSON (or protobuf) mess on eg. S3 where you're paying by the byte, but at the same time, you're looking at key parts of your infra which are spending double digit percentages of their CPU time just decompressing stuff.

Sure, you can say the problem is JSON, protobuf, whatever. But in a huge organization with hundreds or thousands of types of documents, it's a needless friction to require custom optimized formats for each one.

So a faster decompressor is often a no-brainer of a win and can have substantial dollar values attached.

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