The Dutch brought Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) to New Amsterdam, current day NYC, which has developed into Santa Claus as we know it know. Santa Claus is a phonetic derivation of Sinterklaas.
Apparently he was depicted as a thick-bellied Dutch sailor with a pipe and a green outfit in Washington Irving’s History of New York book, so maybe that’s where you got that idea from.
I disagree, but I do agree that there are better options available than JPEG. Lossy compression is actually what allows much of the modern internet to function. 4K HDR content on Netflix wouldn’t be a thing without it. And lossy compression can be perceptually lossless for a broader range of use cases. Many film productions use high quality lossy formats in their production pipelines in order to be able to handle the vast amounts of data.
Of course it all depends on the use case. If someone shares some photos or videos with me to keep, I’d like them to send the originals, whatever format they might be in.