TIL that the scp command does not, by default, compress files it transfers, and that you need to add the -C flag to make it do that, and by doing that I have sped up my transfer speed about 40x, and without this knowledge I have probably wasted literally days of my life waiting for things in the past.
@jimbob rsync likewise. I was so sure rsync at least used compression by default!
@neia @jimbob This might make sense for rsync, as if you're copying between local file systems, all compression is doing is contributing a bit to global warming. Definitely makes sense that it would be default for scp though.