Interestingly I heard that it's not that they're less technology skilled exactly (I'm not commenting that I'd or isn't the case), but instead grown up on a different platform, notably iPhone/iPad/android instead of a PC.
This has meant a big push by companies to develop mobile first. So much so, some companies don't even have a browser version of their system anymore.
Yeah they've always been able to just long press on a file to mark a batch of files to be sent. Any use cases for archives they had were solved adequately by this. However, those aren't better solutions. There are other use cases for archives which those systems can't solve. The companies you point out that develop mobile-only, are hamstringing themselves IMO. I can think of a couple of occasions where I've disengaged with a company specifically because they pushed all possible interactions through their app with no redundancy, and then some function in the app didn't work
It’s also not a really “needed” tech anymore either with high speed transfers and no bandwidth caps. Yes there is cases for it, but they don’t apply to a large amount of people either.
Data compression is allaround us in the modern world, often integrated in places we don't see it clearly.
Office documents saved in the OpenXML format (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx for example) are all actually zipfiles, you can use 7zip to explore them, but don't use any important document.
There are multiple types of data compression algorithms, some are far more efficient than normal Zip.
Other types of data compression tools are: gZip, Bzip2, XZ and rar. Facebook even built it's own compression tool, Zstandard.
Of course there is uses for it, did I not say there was?
There is also literally people who would never need to use a zip file. The post also isn’t about automatic ones, it’s about ones manually zipped and unzipped.
Lol I feel bad you're being downvoted because I do believe there is some truth here. Back in like 2009/10 everything was sent zipped up. Every guy and their dog had WinRAR installed and chuckled about never going to purchase it. You get an email with 20 files and your mate will be like brooo zip that shit
But that happens so much less now, and I do think thats in part due to more drive space, faster content delivery, larger file sharing via drive/dropbox and internal file compression designed for the particular file type.