I've gone back and forth on using featured images on my photoblog at inphotos.org over the years, but now I use them. I don't actually display them though. I use them for my tag/category archives and displaying thumbnails for the posts. I even wrote a plugin to make the archive look like a gallery.

For my photoblog, it irritated me that featured images were quite often cropped or stretched, so now I don't display them at all if set.

I rarely use them on odd.blog. Images are embedded and relate to the surrounding text.

I'm glad you brought up titles too. I post a new photo every single day and before I got an AI to help, coming up with imaginative titles was a pain. I was jealous of other photographers who'd post an image with no text to Facebook or Instagram!