Even if NASA had made every link a 56K GIF they would have slowly lazy loaded with an image outline and Alt text shown allowing you to navigate.
Compare visiting a simple blog post on many sites now. You visit the page, get a brief period of NO text while some slow JS loads. Then all the page assets will bounce around as other elements and JS is loaded, then there's a major refresh as the lazy loading font shows up.
The images are now often deliberately blurred and detail free (Medium) - to show how clever they are using lazy loading. Well, when it triggers successfully, which I find isn't that reliable. Had they provided a very low res starter image rather than blurry obfuscation it'd give something over progressive JPGs.
I'd say the user experience has worked out to be a lot worse. Of course it's higher res and prettier. That's avoiding even mentioning the many who still pay for bandwidth.
Compare visiting a simple blog post on many sites now. You visit the page, get a brief period of NO text while some slow JS loads. Then all the page assets will bounce around as other elements and JS is loaded, then there's a major refresh as the lazy loading font shows up.
The images are now often deliberately blurred and detail free (Medium) - to show how clever they are using lazy loading. Well, when it triggers successfully, which I find isn't that reliable. Had they provided a very low res starter image rather than blurry obfuscation it'd give something over progressive JPGs.
I'd say the user experience has worked out to be a lot worse. Of course it's higher res and prettier. That's avoiding even mentioning the many who still pay for bandwidth.