Every little helps - Photoshop save for web can give you some quite usefull reductions I shaved 1 second of some key pages on kelley search just from optimizing a single image.
but, does it? i mean it sounds like we're talking about taking a few bytes off a probably Xmb or XXmb image.
Now, yer average pro doesn't tend to indulge in the pixel-peeping game (except in private, with the lights down low and the door locked, and always washes his/her hands afterwards), and tends to be reluctant to give away images that can still sell - or at least would prefer it if people kept their own Photoshop/Gimp chocolate out of their personal peanut butter. Even when the images are offered as freebies, there is no reason to force a viewer to download more than they need to make decisions; the hi-rez image will sit behind a link, to be opened at the viewer's discretion. The back button hurts everybody.
not sure why i'm being downvoted. i get it, "every little bit" adds up. but here in the real world removing the EXIF data to save bandwidth is a micro optimization 99% of the time.
You're right that it doesn't make sense to downvote you for that; it was an interesting question.