OK, bouncing around from those URL I finally found this:

https://github.com/google/ngx_brotli/issues/28

That indicates unambiguously that someone does expect files to be pre-compressed on the server and that the main brotli package provides a cli tool (I could not find any reference to that in the brotli docs themselves, such as they are).

So, I think it is appropriate to add this, and one can hope that the program name is indeed 'brotli' so that it matches up with the existing mimetypes docs :)