Do not compress scripts into .vpk for faster access. It's useless and it's a pain in the ass to anyone who wants to use them.
They are packed for two reasons, it makes disk access faster and it allows server owners to use sv_pure. You can clone https://git.empiresmod.com/empires_public/empires_scripts in the custom/<yourmod>/scripts folder to override things.
Disk access faster for only a few KB of data? all scripts combined are a bit over 1MB in total. What does sv_pure do?
For people with harddisks it means they need to do way less seeks as the engine can cache the filenames and offsets when the game loads. The size of files isn't very important for the speedup, the main factor is the amount of files. sv_pure allows a server owner to force players to use original assets, mainly useful for ranked matches where you don't want some players to play with things like transparent textures / particles.
