Yes, Lempel-Ziv is incredibly fast in compression. That's because it's a sort of elegant hack from the 1970s that more or less gets lucky in terms of how it can be made to work to compress files. It's very nice. You said "by almost any metric," though, not "by compression speed and literally nothing else." There is a reason web pages default to using gzip instead of zstd for example.
Absolutely no idea what you're on about with >100 MB. I've used bzip2 for all my hard disk backups for about 20 years now, and I think I broke the 100 MB barrier for local storage at some point during that time.