For long term storage of blocks, we compress at much higher compression levels like you mention. These densely compressed blocks are, in turn, served directly to customers when they download their own files.

For uploads you're right: we'd be theoretically better off with high performing zstd, but there are maintenance costs with maintaining 2 separate compression pipelines that are similar, but different, for upload and downloads.

Plus there is no safe rust zstd compressor and the safe rust zstd decompressor linked in this thread is only recently available and is also several times slower than the safe rust brotli decompressor.