Free software's not-so-eXZellent adventure

> Perhaps that will happen.

It's already happening, and it's been happening for a while, independent of the present events.

The reason is the existence of ZSTD, which at its higher settings has nearly the same compression ratio as XZ, but with much better decompression speed. Many uses of LZMA/XZ have been gradually migrating to ZSTD; newer uses will probably skip GZIP and LZMA and go straight to ZSTD.

Of course, compatibility means that a LZMA/XZ decoder will still be necessary for a long time, for things which had used a LZMA/XZ encoder in the past (and this includes systemd, for its journal format, since users might still want to read log files which were encoded using LZMA, even when newer logs are being written using ZSTD).