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This is actually something that flip-flops across hardware generations and platforms. Hard drives used to be really slow and consumer machines would often reduce data bandwidth by compressing things because processors were “faster” than disk. But today’s SSDs are actually really fast, sometimes so fast that CPUs can barely keep up just processing the data coming off of them, so the balance can also shift in the opposite direction. And in embedded your storage might be slow but you may not have the processing power to spare decompressing. Or maybe you do and it saves on flash write cycles. This is a complicated topic!

The article states a "net-positive energy result", not necessarily a faster time for this specific optimization. They say GZIP decompression is energy-intensive, so while the combination of read + decompress may be faster, the CPU load during decompression and memory relocation of the decompressed data ultimately consumes more energy than reading an uncompressed kernel and running it directly.

Might've been the case with "spinning rust" (hard drives) but solid state storage can have lower access and read times -- no need to wait for a disk to spin up or move read heads to the right position on a platter etc