Comment by account42

It used to be that Reddit didn't host images and you'd have to link (often shitty) external image hosts. The someone created imgur to host images for reddit. And slowly but surely imgur became just another shitty image host (and social media site for some reason). Then reddit wanted some of the dough imgur was pulling in (probably just making losses) and added their own image hosting. At first it worked just like you are saying with you getting direct links to the image file. Now they also turned into yet another shitty image host.

Part of the blame for the redirect-to-wrapper page lies with browsers. If browsers didn't let servers reliably differentiated between a direct request and an <img> embed then this practice would not be as widespread.