I’m not fully convinced of my own position here, but I have long suspected that “zipping” at all is an abstraction that shouldn’t really be exposed to the user. Like it’s a throwback to an earlier era.
The basic trade off is size for speed, and it seems like most cases it could handled automatically at the level of the file system maybe. Like if I have a big file that I want to send, it sort of feels like the software I use to send it should do the work of preparing it for transport to the target system. Similarly, if there are files that aren’t being touched very often shouldn’t the file system figure out that file can be in “small, slow” mode? Or maybe if I know a particular file should be always fast or always small, I should have the option in the file properties for it to be Automatic, Always Small, or Always Fast, like a toggle right near the permissions controls. But not like a separate program that generates separate, smaller, slower files of a special type. Why can’t folders be automatically treated like singular archives when I try to do operations on them for which that makes sense? Why do I have to think about these details?
I’m probably missing some important use cases and archiving features, but maybe those can be broken out from the default of “do the obvious thing automatically.”