You could use Firefox on mobile and use ublock origin to auto-block images & third-party content by default, then it doesn't use almost any bandwidth. I'd imagine jerboa uses similar amounts since it also displays images without any data saver settings as I can see.
F-droid is pretty slow in picking up versions, how f-droid works by default is that you register a source code repository with it and then f-droid goes ahead and checks the source code and builds and checks the application themselves to put in their repository. All this takes about 2-4 days usually.
However, for me at least, 0.34 is currently the latest one on the official f-droid repository, maybe there's some other issue with your fdroid.
But anyway, if you want faster updates, you have to use another app repository within fdroid instead of the official one, IzzyOnDroid's is a trusted one. It doesn't build the apps, but simply goes to the repos and looks for already built APKs and serves those, which is less secure (as it doesn't vet the built apps) and thus faster.
That's reddit from 8+ years ago you're talking about, and small communities. Reddit has long been a mainstream community now, and we all know how the average person is.
Ahem, if you want this done automatically for all URLs on all websites everywhere, you could use this: https://feddit.de/comment/543412 or https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-universal-link-switcher (I made this)