What problem does this address?

Current image+text block uses css background image for the image. The problem is, that this way it is not possible to use loading of the images (https://web.dev/browser-level-image-lazy-loading/#can-css-background-images-take-advantage-of-the-loading-attribute) and so it highly affects the initial page loading and Google LCP metrics https://web.dev/lcp/#what-elements-are-considered

What is your proposed solution?

I believe the same visual functionality can be achieved today with CSS grid/flex and CSS object-fit property

and BTW it would be great if all the image/gallery blocks would have lazy loading true/false property to set (with some option for the defaults).