I added Smush - what a mistake. Somewhere, it is changing which image is being loaded in the featured image spot, not by image compression but by loading the appending 1024x768.jpg string to the image url. I can't find where to undo this. My mistake was that I also deleted the smush plugin and redownloaded it in attempts to use a setting to adjust this.
src=.jpg
Previous to installation of the plugin, the size was not being appended to my featured images. Previous articles weren't affected. I changed settings to 2000x2000 from 1024x1024 in the WordPress dashboard.
Markup before:
<img width="1024" height="768" src="hackoutdoors/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/…" data-lazy-type="image" data-src="hackoutdoors/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/…" class="attachment-magazine-7-featured size-magazine-7-featured wp-post-image lazy-loaded" ...
Markup after:
<img width="1024" height="576" src="hackoutdoors/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/…" data-lazy-type="image" data-src="hackoutdoors/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/…" class="attachment-magazine-7-featured size-magazine-7-featured wp-post-image lazy-loaded" srcset="hackoutdoors/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/… 1024w, hackoutdoors/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/… 300w, ..
