De gustibus I suppose, but to me, “Images are a feature many or most articles use and which a very small number benefit from.”

You're right. I shouldn't have said many. I forgot some like to put memes in their articles. I still think the ability to use images can be important, depending on topic. Quite simply a blog about anything graphics-related would benefit.

I've been told Medium requires a huge photo at the top of each post, regardless if it makes sense or not for the article. Most of the time those articles are simply junk.

Agreed, but on a technical level it makes it harder for the client software to have to decide what to do with those resources. A plain-text post can sit on my drive for months until I get around to reading it with barely any impact on disk space usage.

With images I either have to eat the storage utilization for them or suffer a privacy leak by loading them when the post is opened. For the latter, there's always a small risk that a post could be deleted or an entire website vanish in between the time my feed updates and the time I open a post, in which case it would be left with text but broken images. I guess they could be inlined (like `<img src="data:image/png;base64,etc"/>`) to avoid that risk. It's even more obnoxiously complex if we're using the modern `picture`/`srcset`/etc to serve multiple resolutions and image formats for various screen sizes, connection speeds, and platforms.