I think this may not be a very high bar. zippy in Nim claims to be about 1.5x to 2.0x faster than zlib: https://github.com/guzba/zippy I think there are also faster zlib's around in C than the standard install one, such as https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate (EDIT: also mentioned elsethread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43381768 by mananaysiempre)
zlib itself seems pretty antiquated/outdated these days, but it does remain popular, even as a basis for newer parallel-friendly formats such as https://www.htslib.org/doc/bgzip.html
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