What's true is that images & video are effective distractors, and most content "servers" want impressions and ad clicks. I don't think this means that most visitors/readers are necessarily looking for image-/video-heavy content.
The likes of Youtube, etc. may be an exception (where it's clear people have come to the site looking specifically for a video), but even there, the suggested videos sidebar, etc. are not things that visitors necessarily ask for/want, but rather things that benefit advertisers in terms of user attention.
This idea that techies are a different species to "normal people" is an overused red herring. Of course every user/demographic has their different preferences, but generally speaking the only difference with "techies" in this particular instance is awareness: due to familiarity with the medium, they are more deliberate in what they want—and more conscious of image-/video-heavy content being a distraction from what they're looking for—than the average user. This doesn't necessarily mean they're actually looking for different things.
I'd suggest that people go where people are. They probably do want life and would likely be happier if they were interacting with other real live people. But our society is increasingly fragmented with people with good jobs being forced to work all the time and people with bad jobs being forced to work irregular hours and the people with stable reasonable jobs shrinking. This is probably just one factor that leads people to try to socialize online and thus seek a simulacrum of authentic experience which leaves them lacking often in comparison to what a real life experience would be. People who are seeking utility or information through the Internet are less inclined to desire distractions, but people who are seeking distractions or entertainment are probably more inclined towards shiny. The challenge we face is that all human activity is being pushed into the domain of a surveillance panopticon house of mirrors where even people seeking to interact with other people face to face are required to participate lest they be disinvited. This is specific to things like Facebook groups and events to coordinate activities. But yeah advertisers do follow people and they also help corral people by feeding social media companies into places so they have a captive audience.
Most people want images. Most people want more than images, they want video.
You just need to look at news sites, the main Reddit page or the Facebook feed of a regular person.
What techies want is far removed from what the majority of people want.
Similar story with free products (regular people) and privacy (techies).