[SemanticStrengh]

> the issue linked above has 5 upvotes in 3 years and no one even bothered to report a separate issue for the memory leak in `<ion-img />`

It looks like you answered yourself, this issue does not seem to affect people. Either it is a rare intermittent or only happen in very specific configurations, either there is a leak but it is negligeable, or shortlived. OR maybe this leak cause suboptimal performance but it must not be "feelable" although you did a great find, this issue has been overlooked and its severity should be better investigated. I'd like to remind you that Ionic is not the point, Ionic is simply a packaging of good practices and optimized components (because yes ion-img implement important optimizations over a normal img tag). Some might have leaking issues but the point is that you can trivially use a standard img tag, or a regular react/angular image lazy loading library or even better https://chromestatus.com/feature/5637156160667648 The web BTW will probably be the first ecosystem to provide support for JPEG XL images, which are a significant evolution in performance. Compare the discussed underinvestigated suboptimality with e.g. this 50% CPU increase over a trivial GIF, and mostly ignored/delayed https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/88858 or even https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/94205

> Every framework has bugs and feature requests that are fighting for resources. relativism has its limits, chromium has thousands more human resources than flutter and react native devs combined