>>9594
>We have more internet, so people aren't as perpetually worried about transferring forty-megabyte files as if it were a sip of coffee, but it used to be a whole afternoon - so you cropped, and downsampled, out of courtesy for people who wanted to look at OTHER images, too.
This is a fantastic point! Yes. I will also add:
>>9592
> Images with those compression artifacts may feel like older/vintage image files.
Often, in 90% of cases, what makes something feel older and vintage, ...nostalgic and the aesthetic has as much to do with the limitations of the medium over just purely stylistic choices. Why does old new footage even from the early 2000s feel old to many people? It is not just better graphics and a different stylistic sense but also because we are in a world where 1080p is the norm standard and now we notice the film grain and are unused to the 4;3 aspect ratio.

It is also why so many old timey TV shows had usually simple camera work and bright lit rooms even in the late 1990s when CGI would massively benefited from a dark setting to hide the contrast (and some tried, but it wasn't to the same level that they could do on movies).