What I'm wondering is why the alleged "first" picture of this kind is of a star 160,000 light years away. There are hundreds of millions of stars in that distance range from us. I suppose there may be a reasonable explanation having to do with optimal visibility or something, but my intuition is completely failing here.
Edwin Hubble [...] in 1925 [...] identified extragalactic Cepheid variable stars for the first time on astronomical photos of Andromeda [...] In 1943, Walter Baade was the first person to resolve stars in the central region of the Andromeda Galaxy.—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy
The List of stars with resolved images (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_with_resolved_im...) contains all those stars starts (unsurprisingly, on hindsight) with the Sun of which the first photograph was made in 1845; the next star to be visible on a photograph as a disk, not a point, was only made in 1993. I grew up in the knowledge that all stars (except for the Sun) are too far away for them being resolved; that became obsolete 30 years ago. Sadly, the list ends with 2014 and does not (yet?) include the new observation.
So yeah, even big, close stars like Betelgeuse (1995) are hard to resolve.