Technically if you update a zip on the remote machine it'll work fine (the data gets appended in an update and the central directory record is always at the end of the zip.
I recall that tar has no end market at all so you can just append a new entry to it as well and when unpacked it'll overwrite the file from earlier in the archive. So they would work fine with rsync unless the tar is also compressed.
The tradeoff between zip and tar.{gz,xz,z} is that zip entries are compressed in the individual file context whereas in a compressed tar the entire archive is compressed in the same context. This may be a slight win for archives with many small files with similar structure.
Technically if you update a zip on the remote machine it'll work fine (the data gets appended in an update and the central directory record is always at the end of the zip.
I recall that tar has no end market at all so you can just append a new entry to it as well and when unpacked it'll overwrite the file from earlier in the archive. So they would work fine with rsync unless the tar is also compressed.
The tradeoff between zip and tar.{gz,xz,z} is that zip entries are compressed in the individual file context whereas in a compressed tar the entire archive is compressed in the same context. This may be a slight win for archives with many small files with similar structure.