Reddit's image hosting implemented blocking direct linking to image files and started substituting an HTML-ish page like imgur does a few months back. After much complaint they actually fixed it so that the image in the hijacked URL's HTML is a real image tag (<img src="ht..) with a real URL to the image file. For a while it had been a javascript defined custom html element (web components) instead of an <img>.

So at least they did that right. imgur has been failing hard at this for ~5+ years.