Sympathetic, but noscript compatibility has been out the window for a decade at least. You can't reliably book travel, interact socially, read email, buy basic retail items, etc, without being extremely selective about providers. I'm with you philosophically, but that ship sailed long ago.
If the New Yorker would use the proper format of SVG here (or even PNG — the diagrams are all JPEGs), they would likely compress even better; most of them also include a ton of whitespace either side of the actual image. Testing one of them, the size falls by ~28% if you correct for all this.
On mobile, where my connection is less reliable, I also have a strong distaste for lazy loading: it squanders all the time available from when I started reading until now. Then, when the image is finally in view, then we start the long haul of fetching it, and risk that I've again lost good connectivity.
Conversely, I like that it doesn't waste my data if I only get 1/2 way through an article and have to close it because I'm out and about and the world around me may interrupt me reading something on my phone.
