The consolidation brought back two Driver citations from older branches that
the reference sweep had already cleared from development. Both keep their
engineering reason and lose the speaker: a gate's rationale for existing, and
the mechanism of the print collapse.
Caught by check:no-new-driver-references, which is the point of running the
full chain rather than the seven gates the merged package.json had left.
rega measured a cold load of Simple Research pulling 24 people-group photos, 5.3 MB,
DURING BOOT — alongside the map engine and the API data, on one connection. Nothing was
wrong with any single image. There was no instruction about WHEN to fetch them, so the
browser fetched them all at once, which is the correct behaviour for markup that says
nothing.
Past the first row the cards now load lazily, at low fetch priority, decoded off the main
thread.
★ THE FIRST ROW STAYS EAGER, and that is the half a blanket loading="lazy" gets wrong.
Lazy-loading what the reader is already looking at trades a visible flash of empty cards
for bytes nobody saves. EAGER_IMAGES is a COLUMN COUNT, not a taste: the grid is
repeat(auto-fill, minmax(240px, 1fr)) unless a host overrides cards-per-row, so the first
row is never more than five cards at any width. It is a constant rather than a read of
perRow because the override is the host's state and this only needs a safe CEILING —
generous by a card costs a few KB, short by one lazy-loads something in view.
The size is stated on the element as well as in CSS. .uupg__image already carries
aspect-ratio 1/1, which is what actually reserves the box; width/height repeat the same
1:1 as an intrinsic ratio for the moment before the stylesheet applies. The same truth
twice on purpose, not a second different one.
check:grid-image-loading exists because this component is being MERGED with the regions
list right now, and a merge rewrites markup: four attributes on one <img> survive a review
and not a rewrite, and losing them is invisible — the page still works and costs 5.3 MB
again. It also fails if it cannot find the element, and asserts the first row is eager,
which a bare loading="lazy" would otherwise pass. Negative-tested four ways.
Coordinated with regions-plugin before touching a file they are actively reshaping: their
six hunks bracket this element without touching it, so neither of us collides.
