It was really disappointing when dpkg actively deprecated support (which I feel they should never do) for lzma format archives and went all-in on xz. The decompressor now needs the annoying flexibility mentioned in this article and the only benefit of the format--the ability to do random access on the file--is almost entirely defeated by dpkg using it to compress a tar file (which barely supports any form of accelerated access even when uncompressed; like the best you can do is kind of attempt to skip through file headers, which only helps if the files in the archive are large enough) and, to add insult to injury, the files are now all slightly larger to account for the extra headers :/.

Regardless, this is a pretty old article and if you search for it you will find a number of discussions that have already happened about it that all have a bunch of comments.