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I'd say it's an artistic constraint.

It forced her to search through everything possible in CSS (an obviously-limited medium), and get creative to convince it to draw these.

By creating images in css you don't have to load any additional assets.

You can embed svg elements directly into html.

AFAIK you can embed images in CSS using data URIs, so there goes that argument and only the show-off one remains ;)

You can do that, but I think embedded images are slightly larger than the original because the way they are encoded. But still, images are more practical since these would be a cross-browser nightmare.

*her skills

You can inline svg.