FWIW, this tool is first developed by Debian for their reproducible builds toolchain for inspecting differences, then passed down(or up?) to reproducible builds consortium/effort.
It also compares a ton of different formats, by converting them all to plain text and diffing that. All the deps are for those format converters. On Debian at least there is a minimal version with much fewer deps, since all the deps are pretty much optional.
The number of file formats supported is huuuge, I'm going to put this in my pocket just for the ability to compare deb packages (I tend to do that a lot).
Does it handle different iteration orders for zip files? I once had to debug a problem with a build that occurred because while our build usually ordered files alphabetically, this particular build did not and that mattered for how Spring resolves dependencies.
I just tried to install it on debian and it tried to pull in quite a few unexpected dependencies (e.g. 'libguestfs-reiserfs,' 'libintellij-annotations-java,' or 'r-cran-class').
I mentioned this in another comment, but I once had a bug with a build caused by a JAR file (which is just a zip archive) ordering the files differently inside the zip archive. I'm not sure if it would handle that particular case, but more commonly you might have a huge build directory and want to see what files are different (particularly on Windows where you can have dozens of different DLLs).
This saved a lot of effort verifying artifacts when my team ported a large codebase from maven+cmake to bazel. It's very good when you're doing build changes, large scale refactors, or partial rewrites.
Beyond build engineering, I've also found it useful to debug container image differences.
