This seems to be related to this chromium issue. Where the maximum quality when resizing doesn't produce the expected result.
bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail
C3 is using a browser feature to produce resized images when it is available, if it is not available, it falls back to our own implementation of a resizing algorithm, which I have noticed produces better results, the problem is that it isn't as efficient as the browser and it is prone to run out of memory.
For a while now the feature has been supported by browsers, so the custom resize logic isn't used. In any case, I prefer to not use that because the browser implementation will be way better, assuming it works. The problem is that there is no reasonable way to detect if the resizing is working properly or not to fallback to our resizing method.
Is this a problem in other browsers? Namely Firefox and Safari.