No, it's not about sending large files over the wire, it's about saturating the RAM of the script that reads the content. If the script is naive enough, a zip bomb will do. Example on my machine, such a snippet will cause the OS to close the python process:

    >>> from requests import get
    >>> r = get("https://acme.tld/trap/")
    >>> r.text

The server doesn't do much (serving a relatively small number of bytes) while the client basically crashes.