It would be interesting to see some economics of what 8,000% increase in encoding time takes to make that money back in terms of storage or bandwidth. I also wonder how brotli/lzma would compare here. Are there some obscene modes on those that had similar results?
Far better, just like anything else based on arithmetic coding. The main distinction here is that the output can still be decompressed with a standard Inflate implementation.
And for decompression, the effect on memory usage and timings?
...and of course it's written by someone with a Russian name, and has that characteristic style common to many other articles about data compression.