If Aspera is as good as the parent suggests it's probably because they are operating a bittorrent-like network of geo-distributed peers. It would be very cheap to emulate that using cloud computing providers, especially if you are discarding the data after transfer.
The special sauce is measuring the packet loss quickly enough to make sure your not over saturating the link
Apart from that, its a fairly simple protocol.
It absolutely does not measure packet loss at all. The only response to a dropped packet is to request a re-send.
The protocol is simple but depends on very smart sending rate control. Much of the complexity of the current version is to perform well when the receiver has a slow disk, or the link goes through a satellite.
Zstd compresses better than Zip, and unpacks many times faster. It can re-use a custom dictionary saved off from a previous compression, so you can get quick startup time for later fragments.
The parent would probably be best off using one of the specialty genomics compression tools, that's why I linked to them.
Writeup on zip file Appnotes: https://entropymine.wordpress.com/2019/08/22/survey-of-zip-a...
Actual PKWare AppNotes: https://support.pkware.com/display/PKZIP/Application+Note+Ar...
Section 4.4.5 is "compression method"
It is little different from building with ARMs instead of Z80s. Where Z80s were once a good choice, now they are almost always a bad choice. Obsolete. USB sticks vs floppies, OLED vs fluorescent-backed LCD, valacyclovir vs acyclovir, Google vs Altavista, Git vs Subversion vs RCS. Need I go on?
From your point of view was the implied statement something akin to: "In the context of a high-throughput network transfer program choosing DEFLATE over an algorithm more well optimized for computational weight wouldn't be a good idea." ?