I wonder what if anything has changed ever since this article. Is llm-based compression more mainstream?

Fabrice Bellard did something with neural nets and a transformer model [1] that was very successful.

I suspect that LLMs wouldn't be ideal to use as compressors, because they are large, consume a lot of resources, and are constantly changing. You need the model to produce exactly the same output at encoding and decoding time, or else you get gibberish.

[1] https://bellard.org/nncp/