True, but the driving force of TFA is about the time it takes to get to interactivity. Loading 1.2MB less out of the gate is going to help that significantly.

In what browser does eager image loading interfere with "interactivity"? Let's face it, they know most readers probably don't read/scroll to the end so it saves transfer costs on a decent scale --- which is fair enough.

"Half a megabyte of packed JS" still sounds way overkill for delayed image loading.. =)

Please show your working. Downloading >400KB, unpacking it, parsing it, running it is always faster across the board than just downloading the images? Interactivity? Please, I can scroll the page without the images or vast amount of JavaScript being loaded. What gain has interactivity on this article? How does your point related to the fact that there's a vast amount of JS in the page, where the author tells us no to do so.