If a .zip file contains all of the information of the original, just in less space, why does it have to be unzipped to access any of it?
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There is no need to uncompress the data if you just want access to the compressed data, you can open the zip file in for example a hex editor. The question is what you would do with it, you do need to uncompress it to get the original data back.
The simplest way to access the data is to let uncompress a file or all of it with a program that is designed to do that, It is not a required way, you can mount the file as a file system program that can access directly. Then the decompression is done on the fly.
Here is how you can do it in Linux https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/168807/mount-zip-file-as-a-read-only-filesystem there is a program that can do it in windows https://www.winarchiver.com/tutorials/how-to-mount-zip-file.htm there are likely other.
You can’t just do that without mounting it as a file system in general because the operating system has not to be coded to include that functionality. It could have been done but it has not been done. The data will still be uncompressed but it will be done when you request the data. Because of how zip files work writing back will be more complicated and slower, the Linux example mounted they read-only.
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