[jltsiren]

By cutting edge technology, I meant the latest products that are better than the earlier ones.

I work in bioinformatics, where people typically use either gzip or domain-specific compressors. gzip is used for the reasons I mentioned. It works, it's usually good enough, and if people in another organization you've never heard of want to use your compressed files, they can do so without bothering you with support requests.

zstd would be faster and compress better, but because you can't be sure everyone else can use it, you don't even bother thinking about it. The saved computational resources are probably not worth it. On the other hand, anything that makes gzip faster is valuable, as it allows saving computational resources without taking any interoperability risks.

I didn't say the gzip replacement must be better than gzip in every aspect. I said it must not be substantially worse. bzip2 was substantially worse, because it was substantially slower.