Sure, as long as that other thing knew not to treat the file as a zip, or had a mechanism to skip over or blank out the first chunk of the file.

I wonder how Windows Defender would treat something that looked like a self-extracting archive? Perhaps the archive portion could be this zip bomb affair, but the executable portion had a small change in it to bypass that and do something else nefarious instead, eg hand execution control to a point later in the file.

I don't see why not; just have the payload stored after the bomb - if there are no share dependencies (which there wouldn't be) there's no reason why they shouldn't be independently extractable.