Ask HN: Do People Care About Image Optimisation Anymore?

Maybe I'm showing my age a bit, but I recall hearing that images should be saved in formats based on their type to save on file size. So, photographs would be JPEGs, illustrations and icons would be PNGs, vector images would be SVGs, etc.

But now it feels like no-one does this anymore. Every site I've seen just seems to store all images as webp now, with many outright uploading multiple megabyte photo files in PNG format. There also doesn't seem to be a lot of care put into uploading images that match the dimensions needed for the largest device either, with even tiny GIFs on sites like Discord often being full-sized images dozens of megabytes in size.

So, did the internet just decide that bandwidth and image sizes aren't a concern anymore? Did everyone just accept that every image is posted to one of the same 3 services and that everyone has a high-speed internet connection now?

It just feels weird after all the talk of performance in the 90s-2010s.