If you have a folder that's full of files and need to send it to someone or otherwise store it efficiently, archiving the folder into a .zip file is a good way to do it. Of course, on Linux systems, it's probably more common to come across compressed tar files, but zip archives are still ubiquitous and a perfectly viable choice.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://linuxconfig.org/zip-folder-in-linux