> GIF, PNG, JPG

It makes more sense to transmit binary formats in binary.

You would save bandwidth, memory and a decoding step.

Then you could also inspect the header bytes, instead of memorizing how they present in some intermediate encoding.

Knowing these magic bytes in base64 is mostly relevant in situations in which you see data encoded by other people, which means you probably had no control over the encoding. Other people (or rather every body) sometimes do things which don't make sense.

Sometimes you need to embed binary data in a text format (e.g. JSON).

I have a tampermonkey script that's a megabyte in size because it includes an encoded gif file.

Thanks, GPT.