[dredmorbius]

There's no risk in invoking Reader Mode. If it doesn't render or omits text, you can simply toggle it off / navigate back to the native page.

Images in online articles are irrelevant the overwhelming majority of the time --- 75%--95% or more. At best they're eye-candy or distractions. They occasionally provide context. Some serve as a contextual reminder. I'd suggest that information-critical graphics (there's information in the image that's not available from the article itself) are in the neighbourhood of 1% of all images. These tend to be graphs, plots, charts, or maps.

They're also generally rendered by Reader Mode, unless the site is very poorly designed.

TL;DR: This is an irrelevant concern.