Author here. I'm familiar with optimizing images via webpack and the like; there's an article I wrote on the same site as this one detailing just that (amongst other things):
The issue is that for many larger sites that are content-managed, the images aren't known at build time. So you need some kind of mechanism in place to deal with optimizing user-uploaded images.
Obviously you don't want truly decorative images indexed; but that's not what the article is discussing (except in the "SO WHEN IS IT GOOD?" section). It's discussing the abuse of CSS background-image for content images, something I've seen as being quite prevalent.
As the article mentioned, this is bad for accessibility, SEO, performances, and other lesser issues.
https://nystudio107.com/blog/an-annotated-webpack-4-config-f...
The issue is that for many larger sites that are content-managed, the images aren't known at build time. So you need some kind of mechanism in place to deal with optimizing user-uploaded images.
Obviously you don't want truly decorative images indexed; but that's not what the article is discussing (except in the "SO WHEN IS IT GOOD?" section). It's discussing the abuse of CSS background-image for content images, something I've seen as being quite prevalent.
As the article mentioned, this is bad for accessibility, SEO, performances, and other lesser issues.