Tangential to the point being made, 98 as quality seems way too high for an image to be shown on the web. 85 seems to be a decent tradeoff. Doing so might actually increase the image size.
(Awesome stuff! That looks like a fun company to work for or found.)
Interestingly, we've done WebP support, and while the files are smaller across the board, visual quality deteriorates really quickly once you start dropping that quality value, even in small increments.