> maybe the thumbnails are scaled at different quality levels???
Agreed, the WebP lossless version looks pretty bad when scaled by the browser. And since virtually no website/device shows images at their native resolution these days, that's something to consider.
On the other hand, most people these days view websites on their phones, so those artifacts will be harder to see.
I dont even think its that - it seems like it was scaled badly by the author of the post not the web browser and that he is not actually displaying the lossless version. If you click on it it goes to the lossless version but the version dispkayed on page is not that version.
It's even worse than what you said: the <img> tag has a srcset attribute with many possible values so different people may see different images depending on their browser's resolution. The one displayed to me was Shoot-Antoine-0044-_DSC0085-lossless-800x450.webp, which shows clear posterization at its native size as well as when it is further scaled down by the browser to 550x309.
Agreed, the WebP lossless version looks pretty bad when scaled by the browser. And since virtually no website/device shows images at their native resolution these days, that's something to consider.
On the other hand, most people these days view websites on their phones, so those artifacts will be harder to see.