Partly correct. But what year it is is, in fact, relevant to any counter-argument that images take up bandwidth and storage space, since both of those are generally plentiful. So is processing power, which allows more and more sophisticated boards like this one to exist and, in general, web-based functionality that would have been unimaginable in the early days of HTML.
The moral of Clippy is that when a wide range of functionality is available, it can be incompetently implemented or, as in the case of inline images, potentially abused. But the solution to the latter, IMHO, is to have policies in place to prevent such abuse, not to disable a very useful function. Pictures can be instructive, and pictures can can be fun, too, which is not a sin. To say that a picture is worth a thousand words may be a hackneyed old aphorism, but it is in fact an understatement.
I note, by the way, that the pictures in the Pet Picture Thread have magically reappeared (at least, at the time of this writing). The thread remains closed while TPTB think about the best policies going forward with regard to inline pictures, and that’s fine, but I urge folks to take a look at it. Some might say “blech! I don’t come here to see pics of people’s cats and dogs” and that’s fine, you can ignore the thread based on its title. But objectively, the worst that can be said about it is “harmless”, and personally I found it cute and entertaining.