Why not use a more widespread compression algorithm (e.g. gzip) considering that Brotli barely performs better at all? Sounds like a pain for portability

I'm not sold on the idea of adding compression to PDF at all, I'm not convinced that the space savings are worth breaking compatibility with older readers. Especially when you consider that you can just compress it in transit with e.g HTTP's 'Content-Encoding' without any special PDF reader support. (You can even use 'Content-Encoding: br' for brotli!)

If you do wanna change PDF backwards-incompatibly, I don't think there's a significant advantage to choosing gzip to be honest, both brotli and zstd are pretty widely available these days and should be fairly easy to vendor. But yeah, it's a slight advantage I guess. Though I would expect that there are other PDF data sets where brotli has a larger advantage compared to gzip.

But what I really don't get is all the calls to use zstd instead of brotli and treating the choise to use brotli instead of zstd as some form of Google conspiracy. (Is Facebook really better?)