Well on mobile (>50% of users) for Android Chrome the zoom is not enabled by default (and it’s under Accessiblility so I had never tried it until now).
Most users might instead just violently poke their mobile screen (like I have been) wondering why this image behaves differently than others.
Also wondering if the different behavior for small images will affect other gallery or lightboxing features.
The problem of not being able to educate user to “enable force zoom” has come up before along with the why is this different issue
I guess I dont understand the violent opposition. If someone doesn"t want or need to see the expanded image/caption/download link, just errr, don’t click on it. In addition the image doesn’t appear differently pre-click so it’s not really a cosmetic issue.