I thought you had gravely misunderstood the article because the author leads with discovering the lossless compression support of WebP and even compares it to advanced lossless compression tools like PNGOUT so I thought he wasn't comparing apples and oranges.

But no. He DOES in fact compare lossy to lossless in the end, arguing the difference is hardly perceptible anyway. Which it is! I could see the loss of chroma when opening them on my desktop here. I don't understand. JPEG also compresses a photo better than PNG? What's the point?

This is just confusing. Sure, for personal use, do whatever you like, but in a comparison...

It would be interesting to see WebP Lossless vs PNGOUT. And/or WebP vs Mozjpeg. :)

There seems to be a lossless specification of webp (that wasn't used in the article)

I can create smaller jpg versions of these photos where I can't tell a difference.

Yes:

> However, the big point here is that without doing any of that, WebP seems to keep the quality I prefer while also reducing the size (doesn’t matter to me whether it’s lossy or lossless).

Not just images but specifically photographs for web distribution. if that's not as far away from intended PNG use cases as can be, it’s getting there.

It helps them store more anime pictures at higher quality for less space. Pretty sure that's all they care about.