Obviously tension is high, and emotions are raw - so, please be gentle (I don't work for Steemit Inc, I just know a little about web servers & running websites).
I'm relatively new to posting images on Steem, but it looks like Steemit previously allowed you to upload hi-res (like you get out of your camera) images, which were included in your posts.
This was great for you as a photographer, but probably not as big a deal as you think. When people view your posts, even though your image might be huge (in megapixels), it's actually displayed quite small. I'd imagine very few people open up the image to it's full size to inspect it closely (which is why I say it's not as big a deal as some might think).
The problem in this approach is that Steemit has to store than [huge filesize] image on their servers. And that opens up three problems#;
The storage space needed to save the file (which while relatively cheap, still adds-up quickly)
The strain on the servers' resources when somebody tries to view it (a file with a big file size takes a lot of bandwidth & processing power to deliver). This is probably the biggest factor, and adds a huge strain on Steemit Inc's overall "running costs".
The time it takes to download your photograph when somebody is viewing your post - slower connections take longer to see photographs with bigger file sizes). This frustrates visitors and makes their user experience on the platform suffer.
So, for [in relative terms] very little benefit, there are huge network and 'running the website/service' costs.
I know that as photographers, we want as our images to be their best quality, but in reality, a tiny percentage of people will actually see that "high quality" version of the photo uploaded.
It looks like Steemit Inc have retrospectively crushed their file sizes of all images they store. They probably did some kind of batch treatment, compressing file sizes. So, what was once a 20Mb file (which would put a massive strain on server resources) is reduced to a 100k file (for example).
This would have huge savings on their system resources, and the costs of running their systems. It might also be connected to them moving to RocksDB, but I don't know anything about that database.
In my view, they've taken too heavy-handed an approach to this, and without warning.
If they'd have pre-warned the community about what they were doing, and perhaps not compressed quite to much, all parties might've been a little happier.