Bringing this up on discord, others point out that the windows build requires zlib for convenience when we transitioned from having a vendored copy in our repo and that smaller "embedded" use cases may not like this if they don't already need the dep. But there have been no complaints about it on the Windows side.

`binascii.crc32` was one thing that motivated me to look into "just require zlib" to get out of carrying our own suboptimal crc32 code.  along those lines, we should recommend people choose https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng rather than zlib.net for better performance.

looking over my PR, it can make for some awkward code with zlib right next to others that we treat as optionals.  good bad or indifferent?  i'm leaning towards indifferent and still enjoying fewer lines of code.