Yeah, sure. The text itself is usually at most a few hundred Kb, and HTML compresses extremely well. Like it's pretty slow to unpack and replay the documents, but it's still a lot faster than downloading them again.
And it's friendlier to the server you're getting the data from.
As a journalist, I have to scrape government sites now and then for datasets they won't hand over via FOIA requests ("It's on our site, that's the bare minimum to comply with the law so we're not going to give you the actual database we store this information in.") They're notoriously slow and often will block any type of systematic scraping. Better to get whatever you can and save it, then run your parsing and analysis on that instead of hoping you can get it from the website again.
As a journalist, I have to scrape government sites now and then for datasets they won't hand over via FOIA requests ("It's on our site, that's the bare minimum to comply with the law so we're not going to give you the actual database we store this information in.") They're notoriously slow and often will block any type of systematic scraping. Better to get whatever you can and save it, then run your parsing and analysis on that instead of hoping you can get it from the website again.