Slightly related question: Does the carbon footprint increase with all this client side rendering?
I would think just rendering something charcoal on the computer of the designer should be enough, rather than repeating it on the machines of thousands of visitors?
Yes, and if your website is using CSS effects to change the same image for every user then you're making a mistake. Just render the modified image to a static asset and serve that.
However, if you want to use a pencil effect on an image that you don't have control over (eg a user's image before they upload it, or something from an API-driven service like Unsplash) then the technique still has a lot of value.
It's a good question. What about the network transmission? What's the carbon footprint of transmitting a 50k image to thousands of visitors vs a handful of bytes in css? I agree it does push more energy usage to the client, but I'm not sure how total energy usage adds up.
In any event I don't like it because it kills my battery.
I would think just rendering something charcoal on the computer of the designer should be enough, rather than repeating it on the machines of thousands of visitors?