Four years of optimizing React and Next.js projects taught me one thing: unoptimized images are everywhere, and nobody wants to fix them.
Every project has the same pattern. Heavy PNG and JPG files are sitting inside /public, there is no consistent image pipeline, and some of those files have no business being that large in a production codebase.
This is especially common in small and mid-sized projects. There is no CDN transformation layer or dedicated asset pipeline. Images get added while the product is moving quickly, and the cleanup becomes a task for “later.”
Later, of course, never comes.
Then, at 1am, while refactoring an extremely vibe-coded Next.js project, I found myself doing the cleanup manually again.
