Makes sense, this is somewhat analogous to the import speedup you can get by putting all the python modules into a zip file. I tend to do that when distributing python applications on windows, where the speedup is more noticeable.
Yep, it's similar, but squashfs is more optimized than zip files for random access like a filesystem (rather than an archive). Also when using zstd-based squashfs files, there is much less overhead for the decompression itself which effectively becomes free.
