It reminds me of an effort to improve docker image format and make it move away from being just a tar file. I can't find links anymore, but it was a pretty clever design, which still couldn't beat dumb tar in efficiency.
Transferring around dumb tar is actually smart because the HTTPS connection can negotiate a compressed version of it to transfer - e.g. gzip, brotli, etc. No need to bake in an unchangable compression format into the standard.
