Definitely there's a lot of workloads that are pure data-munging, where you don't want to store the whole bloated JSON (or protobuf) mess on eg. S3 where you're

Definitely there's a lot of workloads that are pure data-munging, where you don't want to store the whole bloated JSON (or protobuf) mess on eg. S3 where you're paying by the byte, but at the same time, you're looking at key parts of your infra which are spending double digit percentages of their CPU time just decompressing stuff. Sure, you can say the problem is JSON, protobuf, whatever. But in a huge organization with hundreds or thousands of types of documents, it's a needless friction to require custom optimized formats for each one. So a faster decompressor is often a no-brainer of a win and can have substantial dollar values attached.