I just right click and select the images with uBlock as they come on screen - maybe not the most programmatic way of dealing with them (blocking all of their host, assuming they were all hosted by the same platform, might have been quicker) but it saved some gif aggravation.

My works IT department also gets rid of those annoying gifs automagically...along with less annoying images often related to my job

Firefox's Reader view does the same.

Neat. The story was interesting enough with that tool.

Well... yes! It does!

Block out all the images and replace them with whitespace. Now, fully remove the images. Which is easier to read?

Well-designed use of whitespace is necessary to make text easy to read. However, this is neither well-designed, nor whitespace. I constantly have to scroll down, reposition the next couple of paragraphs on my screen, and reacquire the text. That is not easy to read.

Imagine that after every paragraph, there was just a large empty space you had to scroll past. Like a book where every other page is blank.

Yes, it's actually physically harder to read.