[mattmanser]

Because the middle ground is what happens in real life. Many sites have poorly designed mobile experiences that zoom helps fix. I personally have my mobile Chrome set to over-ride site viewport settings to always allow zoom.

For example wikipedia (used to?) disable zoom while making all their pictures small. But what if the picture has the information you want to see?

This is because a lot of content on the internet is long form reading with pictures, and ideally you'd want the middle ground, responsive quick scrolling with the ability to zoom on pictures, infographics, etc. and then zoom out again to carry on reading.

And before you say it, all picture viewers on mobile suck. We already have an amazing, built in solution.