It's pretty impressive how fast zstd has risen and been integrated into just about everything. It's already part of most browsers for compression. Brotli took a lot longer to get integrated even though it's better than gzip as well (but not as good as zstd).
It's true, using some rather non-obvious trickery: https://github.com/madler/zlib/blob/develop/examples/zran.c
I also wrote a tool to make a randomly modifiable gzipped disk image: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2022/12/01/creating-a-modifiable-...
Sure, but zstd soundly beats gzip on every single metric except ubiquity, it is just straight up a better compression/decompression strategy.
It's pretty impressive how fast zstd has risen and been integrated into just about everything. It's already part of most browsers for compression. Brotli took a lot longer to get integrated even though it's better than gzip as well (but not as good as zstd).