Feather appears to just be block compressed Arrow IPC [1]. Lightweight compression techniques generally achieve two orders of magnitude faster random access compared to block compression. That’s one of the benefits of formats like FastLanes, Vortex, DuckDB native, etc. DuckDB has a good blog post about it here: https://duckdb.org/2022/10/28/lightweight-compression.html
This is referenced in the link above. https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/ipc.html
Unfortunately I'm stuck with CSV at work for now.