Huffman encoding should be a mandatory topic you can explain before you are allowed to write a web api. I hate when people output json that's not self documenting enough because they don't understand that aReallyNiceLongNameThatDescribesTheAttribute and nam1 compress to functionally the same size once you turn on compression. One API recently I saw had a few single letter names. I could still figure it out, but it wa…
Huffman coding alone wouldn't do a lot in that example. Huffman coding lets you build a prefix code to pack symbols into variable length sequences of bits, depending on the frequency of the symbol. A dictionary encoder, like LZ77, would replace repeated sequences by references, and that would make the two variable names equivalent. Deflate uses Huffman coding to pack the LZ77 compressed data using as few bits as possible, making it more efficient, but LZ77 is the part removing the redundancy.
I agree with the general sentiment though. Compression isn't magic, and understanding how it works helps you to work with compressed formats.
Writing your own implementation of some compression algorithms is a lot of fun to. I learned a lot from implementing Huffman coding and an LZ77 variant a few years ago.