Thanks for writing the summary for the current image-proxying related issues. I prefer the “proxying images route” for better privacy, but its drawbacks sounds worse.
If Lemmy has a user-customizable setting like “Don’t load external media automatically” (including images, videos, etc.), I’m happy with the “passing through external images” route.
Oddly, the endpoint on lemm.el and lemmy.ml return comments:
I think it would be better to ask the admin of the instance before creating the issue.