Is that sarcastic? If you're browsing without JS, or even without first-party JS, the images are basically worthless. I'd much rather they used CSS to accomplish whatever they were going for there.
For many sites, the entire site is often delayed because of pictures, or gets several layout events as the pictures trickle through (or, they never do, and it's not always clear if there should or shouldn't be an image).
What's your preference for a placeholder? Nothing? Broken image? That's fine, but I prefer Bloomberg's low quality version.
Looks like they didn't even add a <noscript> tag (though generally I think uMatrix doesn't play nicely with noscript because scripting is selectively disabled, not entirely disabled), which would be at least a token effort towards alleviating the problem.