I'd by far rather see several full article-appropriately sized sideline image at only progression step 1 or 2 out of 5 or 6, than several empty boxes all showin

I'd by far rather see several full article-appropriately sized sideline image at only progression step 1 or 2 out of 5 or 6, than several empty boxes all showing spinners while the images load in. Plus I'd love the ability to say "I'm on a low bandwidth, $$$ per megabyte network, stop loading any image after the first iteration until I indicate I want to see the full one" because you almost never need full-progression-loaded images. They just make things pretty. Having rudimentary images is often good enough to get the experience of the full article. (whether that's news, or a tutorial, or even an educational resource. Load the text and images, and as someone who understands the text I'm reading, I can decide whether or not I need the rest of that image data after everything's already typeset and presentable, instead of having a DOM constantly reflow because it's loading in more and more images)