CloudFlare is very close to end users (single digit milliseconds) and gzip is fast and gives good compression. What we can't afford to do is make a file smaller at the cost of increased latency because the compression time was longer. There's a trade off between compression time and delivery time.
So, Brotli makes sense for things we cache (because we can compress out of band) and for large files delivered over slow connections but is not a panacea.
CloudFlare is very close to end users (single digit milliseconds) and gzip is fast and gives good compression. What we can't afford to do is make a file smaller at the cost of increased latency because the compression time was longer. There's a trade off between compression time and delivery time.
So, Brotli makes sense for things we cache (because we can compress out of band) and for large files delivered over slow connections but is not a panacea.