images on articles were used to call out an important piece or to fill space in printed pages and make the paginator (webmaster equivalent of layout machine operator pre-desktop publishing days) life easier to fill pages with text columns.

using images on the header of online articles is literary a cargo cult people do just because they saw it on magazines growing up.

don't even get me started on the use of "eyes" (the larger text repeating a part of the article out of place) on digital media...