Maybe it was that tar I got on my favorite jacket at Mystic Seaport.
You seem to have a newer tar, that has compression and allows '-' arguments, but there are some really old ones out there that do not behave as normally or nice. This forum is not UNIX-flavor-specific, and I hate it when an old command refuses my examples!
I do not memorize cpio syntax, I write it in scripts, or I get cpio managed free in recursive modes of cp, rcp, scp, scp2. Some scp2 have a -d that says the target must be a pre-existing dir, so the 'different result second time' problem is averted.
Also tar does not have a linking to original, not copying, option like cpio pass and cp, since when space was a concern and overwrite was not, the object was to create a clone tree of hard links?