It’s probably not a coincidence the other place I’ve seen this technique was also for archiving a feed of fires.

It that case the data was about 250gb when fully uncompressed, and IIRC under a gig when stored as a git repo.

It’s a really neat idea, though it can make analysis on the data harder to do, in particular quality control (the aforementioned dataset had a lot of duplicates and inconsistency).

Like everything it’s a process of trading off between compute or storage, in this case optimising storage.