77kb gzipped is massive considering it’s only doing one thing. If I want my website to load in ~100 milliseconds or less (or even 1 second or less!), I absolutely do need to pay attention to all the libraries I add.
I can and do criticize software developers for making hideously bloated websites because they don’t pay attention to what they add. Not only are a lot of modern websites wasteful, they’re painful or outright useless on slow mobile connections—not a problem for software developers on fibre networks, beefy dev machines, etc.
In other news, I also chose to forgo adding a 15 lb. fuel pump to my go-kart, despite the fact that every NASCAR team in the world uses one, and my go-kart drives just fine. I should go tell the NASCAR teams that fuel pumps are a terrible idea. I clearly know something they don't.
I sometimes render 50mb PNGs. The execution of decoder is insignificant compared to everything else.
Also, my go-kart also gets more miles to the gallon than NASCAR team cars.
Fair point but you have to admit that is a very niche use case.
Have you compared the execution to native performance? Even decoding a 50MB JPEG in Chrome with turbojpeg is going to be a hard pill to swallow.
I haven't benchmarked this specific thing, because I've never used it. But I might, because it sounds like a fun thing to do.