But I don't care about any of that. I don't even care if the rest of the app is what keeps the lights on. Everyone* who visits imgur does so following an image link, they want to view that single image, and will not click anywhere else on the page. Optimizing for another use case seems crazy.

*There is set of users who browse imgur or otherwise use imgur as a kind of "web application", I'm disregarding that part of their userbase for the sake of this discussion. It would surprise me a lot to learn they are more than 1% of users .