i remember arguing about 50MB profile pictures literally 3 years ago after i had used 10GB of mobile data the first 5 days of january 2023. 3 years later, it's somewhat of an issue. people don't like image proxy caches or thing that is centralizing so the solution there would be to have clients not display profile pictures over a certain size and clients optimizing media before uploading like Amethyst does.
Discussion
That's one area where Amethyst fails funnily enough. It doesn't handle avatar uploads, but leaves it to the user, only having a field to enter an URL 😕