"Gzip only provides a compression ratio of a little over 1000: If I want a file that expands to 100 GB, I’ve got to serve a 100 MB asset. Worse, when I tried it, the bots just shrugged it off, with some even coming back for more."
Modern browsers support brotli or zstd, which is a lot better in terms of compression. Perhaps not as good for on-the-fly compression, but static assets can get a nice compression benefit out of it.
With toxic AI scrapers like Perplexity moving more and more to headless web browsers to bypass bot blocks, I think a brotli bomb (100GB of \0 can be compressed to about 78KiB with Brotli) would be quite effective.
https://maurycyz.com/misc/the_cost_of_trash/#:~:text=throw%2...