The new (November 2021) element processing pipeline has a particularly clever approach to path segment encoding, and this document explains that.
By way of motivation, in the old scene encoding, all elements take a fixed amount of space, currently 36 bytes, but that's at risk of expanding if a new element type requires even more space. The new design is based on stream compaction. The input is separated into multiple streams, so in particular path segment data gets its own stream. Further, that stream can be packed.
As explained in [#119], the path stream is separated into one stream for tag bytes, and another stream for the path segment data.