Won't turning off lazy loading just make the whole page go slower to load? You are having to queue up connections at some level, just saying not to do it lazily is just asking to download a ton of crap you could skip out on. Or worse, putting it in contention with the rest of the stuff you are downloading. (Imagine opening several tabs on large stories with tons of images now set to eager load. First thing the browser will likely do, is ignore requests from other tabs. Then, you are just back to the game of the page not loading till you get to that tab.)

My use case is predownloading an article before getting on the subway. Sure it's better to lazy load the images in the common case, but the rare cases where the equations and explanatory diagrams are just blurry smears when you are out of 3g range are really annoying. Having the whole article + images download in the background while you are on another tab would be just fine in those cases. As it stands, I have to pre-swipe an entire Medium article and then go all the way back up to start reading it, if I want to make sure I can keep reading it when the subway is in certain parts of the track.

I just have a bad/unreliable connection, and wish websites would GET while the GETtin is good.

Strictly, I'd agree it is better to preload all content for the article. Sadly, that shouldn't include pictures there just for space. Would be a neat audit to do daily. How many images downloaded contributed to your stories or day?