[quicktwo]

A trie will already run-length encode all the first letters into 26*5=130 bits pre-Huffman coding. I doubt RLE will beat that. A trie will in essence RLE every level but without needing to track the length of the run, so I suspect it'll outperform RLE at every level.

If you have a means of doing RLE that performs otherwise, I'd love to understand how it works.

FYI, turning it into 12972 by 5 and Brotli compressing achieves 15,093 bytes, which is less than if you first turn the data into an ASCII trie then Brotli compress that (14,180 bytes) (Source: https://github.com/adamcw/wordle-trie-packing#all-words).