not sure if you were just expressing frustration or asking for a particular action item here, but if you didn’t see this other post, this seems to be the recommended best practice:
i’m not one who does a lot of embedding of photos, but if that’s really a common practice, and it’s going to happen regardless, it might be worth trying to find a technology-mediated compromise between embedding images and linking to photo pages and observations. for example, maybe instead of putting something like an explicit image reference in your journals, there could be a way to reference and display photos and observations via some sort of iNat-sanctioned markup syntax – just for example, something like <photo:1234>. that kind of thing would be a feature request, though, i suppose.