In the case of media spam, it would be great to click on a face and ban them. However, you need to scroll up until you find a sender profile instead, letting the spam continue for the seconds (or minutes) it takes you to find that avatar to click.

A suggestion could possibly be showing the sender profile when a permalink is being rendered, even if it breaks up the message group. The timestamps are already accessible in spam cases like this, so a moderator could mash the timestamp and get a sender profile to then click and ban.