what is more concerning is that the maintainer didn't understand this impact case, even when two people showed him the exact logic, linenumber and a reproducer. he was still the opinion that this cannot happen in production.
we need a zlib fork
There are already active zlib forks (e.g. https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng), the problem is with having people move to them. It takes a lot of effort to move mindshare from the original version to a fork, there's some historical examples of it happening, but not a ton.