I've just tweaked PieFed to make the images in comments display the same size they do in Lemmy.

Comments with images tend to take up a lot of screen space, and usually they're not very constructive in the first place

I seem to recall such being the case on Lemmy, which is why I was rather bowled over when I got on to PF and discovered how very maximised the images are. Good for mobile I guess, but kind of distracting for desktop.

So yeah, I certainly wouldn't mind if images were minimized / hidden depending on user setting. It would allow me more flexibility in how I lay out my posts, for starters.

I'm not seeing a lot of images in comments. Can you link me to some examples?

You can hide comment images by using this custom css:

.comment_body img { display: none; }

im always up for more options. I don't see using it currently but I can see what you mean and totally might want to turn it off in future.