No, the bits I got to before catching up with the image loading were quite pleasant. It works because the images are actually illustrating and adding content; unlike e.g. the pictures embedded in most news stories, which are really a whole separate piece of content that forces you to jump out of the flow of the story if you want to consume them, these are part of the flow of reading the post.
Except when they fail to load, unfortunately. Content this size should really be hosted on S3 or equivalent, but the author probably didn't expect this scale of traffic.
