I guess what I'm saying is I'm real pissy about the fact that a website with "really not a lot of resources" still took it upon themselves to not compromise on that while every other big platform will do that as the first cost-cutting measure and not think twice about it.
While you can argue that 5MB (if you didnt pay for cohost! plus and got 10mb) might not be a lot for images... it's (I feel) manageable because cohost gave a very clear indication of the limit. And as an artist/photographer posting your stuff online you're probably pretty familiar with image compression tools already (or hell, even the "Export for Web" feature of Photoshop for example) (https://squoosh.app/ is good, btw) so I feel it works out.
Every other social media site won't say shit and will just compress your stuff to hell and back because it "reduces friction".
I feel sometimes friction is good if it means making things slightly better but what do I know.
The thing is that like... it would not be difficult for a website to just say: hey this file is kind of big, we are going to do our best to compress it down to $SIZE, or you could reupload a reasonably-sized version
But giving users agency and control is so inimical to how those organizations think; having consistent and long-lived rules ("image uploads are $SIZE or smaller") is so antithetical to their entire ethos; so instead even if you do compress your images down to a reasonable size, they will fucking mangle it anyway.
you know it's all fucking imagemagick on the backend too