I'd recently noticed this change. It does make it harder for people to steal images, as the Verge article put right in the headline. Given that there are so few websites that encourage the use of pictures—Commons, Pixabay, etc.—on net it's probably a good thing. Even on Commons people should check out the licensing info and make sure a picture has the license they need/expect. So many people assume everything on the internet is
public domain(1) just because it is in the public domain(3).
On the other hand, some sites are so bad about making it hard to find images on a page—huge Pinterest collections are like that—that "view image" was the only practical way to see a higher resolution version of an image.
Still, I think having to go to Commons and see the context of the image is good for helping people understand copyright and to learn about more permissive licenses.