Look long enough at literature on any machine learning task, and someone invariably gets the idea to turn the data into an image and do machine learning on that. Sometimes it works out (turning binaries into images and doing malware detection with a CNN surprisingly works), usually it doesn't. Just like in this example the images usually end up as a kludge to fix some deficiency in the prevalent input encoding.

I can certainly believe that images bring certain advantages over text for LLMs: the image representation does contain useful information that we as humans use (like better information hierarchies encoded in text size, boldness, color, saturation and position, not just n levels of markdown headings), letter shapes are already optimized for this kind of encoding, and continuous tokens seem to bring some advantages over discrete ones. But none of these advantages need the roundtrip via images, they merely point to how crude the state of the art of text tokenization is