Recent versions of photon should improve this (2.0). Based on what you posted before, you’re using an instance hosting an old version of Photon. (this sort of thing is why I complain about instances hosting photon a lot)
Photon uses some obscure Lemmy API things to download images that actually fit the screen so you aren’t wasting tons of bandwidth on 4k images on a 32x32 profile picture.
As far as I know, no other client does this when it really should. Because of this, Lemmy doesn’t really support what I do all that well, and so the downscaling algorithm Lemmy uses causes images to look really low quality.
Are you using phtn.app or some instance’s hosting of it?
I guess I’ve always been the person who likes UI change, I find it exciting to see that kind of thing. I know a ton of people will hate this, but I personally like it. The Android 12 quick settings menu looked awful to me, white straight next to black. Blur is overdue.