Well it got the flags right, but it's kind of wrong too. I mean it's true that GNU tar will not handle a Zip archive, but libarchive BSD tar is more than happy to handle most common archive formats, including Zip archives.

    $ tar -a -cvf file.zip a.exe
    a a.exe

    $ file file.zip
    file.zip: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract, compression method=deflate

    $ tar xvf file.zip
    x a.exe

This may seem like a silly catch-22, but the truth is a lot of people who will need to ask questions like this are in fact likely to encounter BSD tar. macOS ships with BSD tar with Zip support, and I believe even Windows does nowadays. I don't think you'll have an unzip command in vanilla Windows so that could easily waste someone's time if they didn't realize it.