> We usually don’t compress the data on disk; decompression would make loading and file access slower.
Did you actually benchmark this? It probably makes sense in your head, but on any vaguely modern hardware it's very unlikely to actually be true because of how exponential the memory hierarchy is.
Console hardware tends to have fast processors & cache but extremely slow RAM. Benchmarking a console's memory vs cache access tends to be one of the first things a team of principal game devs do and that information becomes bible for their titles.
Did you actually benchmark this? It probably makes sense in your head, but on any vaguely modern hardware it's very unlikely to actually be true because of how exponential the memory hierarchy is.