Of course it was. ImageReady was lean, fast and web-focused. When they killed it you had to buy a PS license and deal with the monolith PS was becoming.
If you're making web pages, you don't need CMYK workflows.
> ImageReady was lean, fast and web-focused. When they killed it you had to buy a PS license and deal with the monolith PS was becoming.
To my knowledge, ImageReady 1.0 was the only version sold standalone - and that was back in 1998; the very next version (in 1999) was sold in-box with Photoshop 5.5 - but the separate ImageReady.exe program was around until 2005 - whereas the way your post is worded implies Adobe were being more customer-hostile than they usually are (hah).
I see your point about not needing the weight of Photoshop's print-and-photo tools when web-design folks back then were just wanting a flexible raster image editor - but my recollection of the web-design scene back then was that most web-designers tended to already have a background in print design work (e.g. think about all the print-shops who expanded into website-design in the late-1990s) - so it makes a lot of sense for Adobe to extend their tooling to support the web and "new media" as we called it - rather than create a new tool which would operate on a completely different, "web-first", domain-model (of course, that's exactly what Macromedia did, and they rightfully have their fans for that).