Maybe you're stuck in some A/B control group type deal, because the same happens to me and the handful of people I've seen accessing imgur while screensharing.
It's not a new development, I believe this has been the case since at least 2016.
If visiting the page directly, we get served a HTML document with a billion resources that loads the image with a comment section beneath it, and includes a sidebar of "related" and "newest in most viral" content.
Possibly even advertisements, but I wouldn't know, as a good friend doesn't let friends browse the internet without an ad blocker.
I've found this to be inconsistent too. Usually I just get the pic but sometimes it seems to go back to the page? And holy hell is that site heavy for something that should just be showing an image, some navigation and a forum thread.
Someone mentioned caching elsewhere, maybe you're viewing a hotlinked imgur picture in the same browser you use to later visit "the page", so it's cached as a raw image.
You could try opening the URL from a different browser? For example my main use case is clicking "Show Original" on Discord, so when it opens in my browser, the first visit is not in the context of an img tag.
I just tested this by loading a couple of images in Firefox, clearing cache and saved sessions in Edge, and pasting the direct URLs of the image files. Both files loaded the image instead of redirecting to the page. So I dunno whether it's in A/B testing, or they're fingerprinting my system in some cross-browser way, or what.
It's not a new development, I believe this has been the case since at least 2016.
If visiting the page directly, we get served a HTML document with a billion resources that loads the image with a comment section beneath it, and includes a sidebar of "related" and "newest in most viral" content.
Possibly even advertisements, but I wouldn't know, as a good friend doesn't let friends browse the internet without an ad blocker.