In theory it sounds alright. It's not great, because Jenkins is usually layered with some existing deploy framework that makes "deploy a zip file" pretty suspec

In theory it sounds alright. It's not great, because Jenkins is usually layered with some existing deploy framework that makes "deploy a zip file" pretty suspect. A healthier setup would look more like "build a Tomcat war file Maven, upload and deploy that with Jenkins". But in context, it sounds like the horror is that people were making and transferring a zip from local code rather than building from the tip of source control.