Gzip was written extremely well. I have been trying to get static compression with Brotli working for compressing web assets, along the way of getting that work

Gzip was written extremely well. I have been trying to get static compression with Brotli working for compressing web assets, along the way of getting that worked out, you realise that few people can be bothered with it, hence you are having to compile your own Nginx modules. I found out the way to do it was to have Nginx run a proxy server that caches the output of another Nginx 'server' that does the Brotli dialled up to 11. So you are making your own CDN. Nothing is difficult when you know it, but Gzip has scratched the compression itch so well that people just do not have a problem with it and therefore do not seek to change it.