Comment by dzogchen

Note that the demotiles style is not really comparable to a production basemap such as ones based on the popular OpenMapTiles schema. The article linked in the announcement has some more findings related to compression ratio.

Also note that lightweight encodings are built into the format, and different tiles can even be encoded in a completely different way. So you have to use heuristics to find the best combination of encodings and often you need to make a trade off between tile size and decoding performance. It is still early days for MLT, but all this means there are a lot of possibilities for optimization. In fact, AWS is again financing work on MLT this year, with a focus on optimization.

Lastly, when benchmarking tile size, it is good to look at actual usage patterns instead of size of the total tile set. Nobody is zooming into a random spot in the ocean, for example. ;-)