> Side note: video game assets are often enormous in size because developers refuse to implement even very basic compression
Be generous; you even said in your previous sentence you don't know if it's common or not, so how do you know developers refuse to implement basic compression? If it's that easy, I'm sure there are plenty of AAA game studios (including mine) that will hire you to just implement basic compression.
There are enormous tradeoffs to make that are platform dependent; read speeds from external media are _incredibly_ slow but from internal media may be fast. Some assets are stored on disk to mask loading/decompression. Lastly, assets are just enormous these days. A single 4k texture is just shy of 70MB before compression and a modern game is going to be made of a large number of these (likely hundreds of them), and many games are shipping with HDR - these are multiples of the size. That's becore you get to audio, animation, 3d models, or anything else.
My current projects source assets are roughly 300Gb, and our on disk size is 3GB or so. My last project was 5Tb of source assets and 60GB on disk. Of course we're using compression.