Gzip encoding has been part of the HTTP protocol for a long time and every server-side HTTP library out there supports it, and phishing/scrapper bots will be done with server-side libraries, not using browser engines.
~~Further, judging by the guy's example in his article he's not using gzip with maximum compression when generating the zip bomb files: he needs to add -9 to the gzip command line to get the best compression (but it will be slower).~~ (I tested this and it made no difference at all).
Being an EU member comes with both Rights and Obligations and the objective was to have the former without the latter.
In fact the Referendum was done because the UK wanted to not to have to obbey the Freedom Of Movement rules for EU citizens entering its country (i.e. the Obligation) whilst keeping it for its citizens entering other EU countries (i.e. the Right) and was using the threat of holding a Leave Referendum to try and blackmail the rest of the EU, and the rest of the EU said "No!"
(This was actually just the later of a long series of instances of the British Government using that technique to get from the rest of the EU "exceptions" from the EU treaties, which went all the way back to Thatcher's time and was how Britain had so many exceptions that nobody else had).
The British Exceptionalism part is that many Britons genuinelly expected they would get that (and also similarly for a lot of other Rights and Obligations, such as being able to import bleached chicken from the US at the same time as having open and uncontrolled access to the Free Market were such food products are forbidden) from the EU as part of the Leave Negotiations.