Morally wrong to remove images?
I must be a very very bad person.
Anyway, my reader doesn't have an SD slot (don't really need it or want it, I only load about 100 books at a time anyway since I prefer to keep all my books in one location in my Calibre library on my PC). But even so that doesn't mean I want epubs over 2000KB when they're usually around 300-400kb. I never delete images that are part of the storyline or any illustrations, even fancy section separators. I will compress them though, there's no reason they need to be 300kb in size when it will look the same if compressed properly down to 60kb. Yes, you can do that even for color images for tablets and see no difference.
What I will always continue to remove is advertising for every other book the author ever wrote, sometimes several authors if from the same publishing house, and then insist on including a cover image for each. Then there's the cover page on page 1... few pages later there's another cover image, same image, just a slightly different size so they can't even use the same one, more senseless bulk. Then further on at the back where there's often "About the Author" blurbs, etc. they include yet another cover image... yes, same image but again a different size. That's just senseless bloat to the book and I'll continue to prune those out. If they have 5 different sizes for the same image for section separators, I'll eliminate 4 of them and use one in all locations. Easy to do with Sigil.
Btw, this thread was never deleted. If I remember I think your originally posted it (incorrectly) in General Discussion and a mod nicely moved over to the Workshop where it belonged. Perhaps you just didn't find it after the move. But I don't think I've ever seen a thread deleted here.