Of course they aren’t small, but they are probably as small as it gets, since they are pretty efficiently compressed. I am not sure what you mean by
it’s not a straightforward operation for even the average developer or systems engineer to restore these into a working format
since it is really trivial to use them. Just load them with Kiwix and serve them as a website. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
When hosting this locally, I don’t see how 200 GB is much of an issue. Storage is so cheap these days, if you want to host it locally, just buy a 256 GB SSD just for that data for $20. Anyway, you were asking for a mirror, to which I replied with the information about the ZIM files. I don’t really understand the issue. Stackoverflow just isn’t that small, there is not much you can do about that.
The download? Maybe, depends on your Internet connection’s speed. Actually serving it as a website certainly doesn’t take hours. It is rather a matter of seconds.