alt Hacker NewsThe point of blurry placeholders is to support loading a page with potentially hundreds of images (maybe with additional lazy loading, which doesn't need JavaScript these days) without blocking display of the page on loading those full images.
I'm not sure why you think it has anything to do with forcing people to execute JavaScript?
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jasonkester • 04/03/2025
Indeed. So the visitor need only wait for the 20mb javascript bundle, but not the 600kb of images, before he can see the 1kb of text that he visited the site to read.
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Can't speak for everyone ofc, but not sure if I ever wanted blurry placeholders when images load fast enough, or found them anything but annoying when not. I think these bells and whistles only serve as designer's self-affirmation.