ZFS encryption is much more space efficient than dmcrypt+unencrypted ZFS when combined with zstd compression. This is because it can do compress-then-encrypt instead of encrypt-then-(not-really-)compress. It is also much much faster.
Source: I work for a backup company that uses ZFS a lot.
Can you explain this in more detail? It doesn't seem true on a first glance.
If you enable compression on ZFS that runs on top of dmcrypt volume, it will naturally happen before encryption (since dmcrypt is the lower layer). It's also unclear how it could be much faster, since dmcrypt generally is bottlenecked on AES-NI computation (https://blog.cloudflare.com/speeding-up-linux-disk-encryptio...), which ZFS has to do too.
Source: I work for a backup company that uses ZFS a lot.