First let me explain how gzip works. When a user navigates to a page lets call this page index.html, the browser then sends a request to the server - normally the file that was requested would be returned. But, if you have gzip enabled on your web server, the server does not return index.html, it returns index.html.gz which the browser downloads and decompresses. Gzipping is like sending a zip file of a much larger file.
The answer to your question is yes and in a positive way. There was a project I worked on a while ago, I used react js - the resulting file after browserify was about 3mb, I minified the source code and it reduced to about 200kb. I enabled gzip on my server and the file was just over 40kb. All the javascript required to run the site was just 40kb.