[TheRealPomax]

Just because the vast majority of roads are for cars doesn't mean we should therefore not try to optimize the bike and pedestrian lanes.

Sure, a lot of the traffic is streamed data rather than HTML, but 30% of close to a zetabyte of data in a single day (for the internet as a whole) is still hundreds of petabytes that can be made drastically smaller. When the numbers are that large, even optimizing for something as "insignificant" as 0.01% of the traffic means 10s or even 100s of terabytes not pumped through the network every day.

[h1d]

You sound like you want to act for the good of the whole human beings but we have priorities over shaving the last bytes off our pages.

You would have a better day to let webmasters know to use gzip if they aren't.

[TheRealPomax]

As always: optimizations are not a matter a of "one or the other" they're about "do all of them". Make the build tool apply all optimizations and minifications, and make the client-server connection negotiate as much compression as possible. Don't stop at just gzip when further improvements are trivial (like this one).