I disagree that it's only on a micro scale. If you look at the picture of the parrots it completely changes the black/white pattern in the face of the red parrot and if you look at the picture of the green bicycle where the luggage rack attaches close to the center of the rear wheel, it's completely mangled, in contrast to the more "blurry" picture where you can clearly see the bolts where it's attached also the rods going from the wheel hub up to the luggage rack also looks very jagged and weird whereas they look fine in the blurry one. There are certainly other errors as well but those where the most jarring I Noticed at a quick glance. I don't think a compression algorithm that does this poorly on cherry picked examples are going to fly when you start throwing real pictures at them. If you are going to screw with the ground truth I bet you could get better results by throwing the blurry pictures in one of those "AI" upscalers.

I would say all of those examples you are picking are at the micro scale. Obviously it's a somewhat arbitrary division between macro and micro, what you consider to be the macro objects versus what you consider to be the micro details.

And this is also going to depend on the level of compression being chosen. Obviously, the greater the compression, the lesser the fidelity. The lesser the compression, the greater the fidelity.