Surprisingly, Akregator is neither broken nor buggy, RSS is.
There are three competing RSS formats supported by WordPress today: RSS 2.0, RDF (RSS 1.0), and ATOM. Of these, ATOM is the most modern and better specified one, while RSS 2.0 is the default in WordPress, and a format that lots of software use.
According to the RSS 2.0 spec, an RSS feed (called a "channel" in the spec) may contain an image, and the image's dimensions may be optionally declared. If they aren't declared, the default values are 88x31px. If you're wondering why 88x31px specifically, see [88x31px]. Images also have a maximum size according to the spec, by the way, which is 144x400px.
Optional elements include and , numbers, indicating the width and height of the image in pixels. contains text that is included in the TITLE attribute of the link formed around the image in the HTML rendering.
Maximum value for width is 144, default value is 88.
Maximum value for height is 400, default value is 31.
https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification (accessed 2024-10-27)
This only applies to an image that is associated with the entire feed. Images contained within the content of RSS articles are just HTML code, so I don't think the RSS spec puts any restrictions on them.
In particular, in HTML, you can specify the dimensions of an image, but if you don't declare them, web browsers just display images according to their intrinsic dimensions instead of just using a specific but completely arbitrary size.
The reason why this image looks wrong on Akregator is because Akregator's developers actually read the spec and followed it, while developers of programs that generate feeds either didn't read the spec or assumed RSS clients wouldn't follow a ridiculous rule like displaying the image at 88x31px exactly by default.
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