I haven't tested it, but would your brotliLibraryCandidates work if I was using Nix?

In the same vein, we might want to look into using extra-libraries and pkgconfig-depends: https://cabal.readthedocs.io/en/3.4/cabal-package.html#:~:text=pkgconfig%2Ddepends%3A,package%20list. (We should probably do the same for zlib as well). The consumer of our library will then need to set extra-lib-dirs if they have a custom install location or an otherwise idiosyncratic installation.

We should also consider using one of the existing bindings to Brotli available on Hackage.