Over time Apple continually improved the HFS+ file system so that by the time Mac OS X 10.6 was launched it actually incorporated AppleFSCompression which is essentially the same feature you're referring to. As time went by the need (and popularity) for these packages waned significantly - mainly because the HFS+ file system was released in the late 1990s and this allowed much smaller block sizes and much larger disk capacities. However, the reason for their popularity was largely due to the small hard drive sizes of that era. These products were very popular at the time (from memory, Disk Doubler was one of the most popular software packages sold for the Mac platform).
Disk Doubler was probably the most popular (because it started the trend), but other options included AutoDoubler and SuperDisk! In the pre-Mac OS X days there were a number of products that basically achieved the same thing. There is no need for users to enable/disable transparent compression in macOS as it's built into the file system.
