I'm not really sure that sentiment applies here. People on slow or unreliable connections probably aren't going to rejoice that they get to see blobs of color for a while until the full images load, all for the cost of waiting longer for the full images and loading more total data at the end of the ordeal.
> all for the cost of waiting longer for the full images and loading more total data at the end of the ordeal.
Thumbhash is tiny (like, 28 bytes base64) and can be embedded in the html itself
Replacing all your CSS class names by one or two letter names would save multiple times this amount even on tiny websites, but I'm not seeing nobody doing this
CSS class names probably don't benefit much unless you're on such low end hardware that you're worried about client gzip costs (and at some point we have to determine some reasonable floor to client capabilities). These embedded thumbnails would presumably be essentially incompressible.
