browser-native lazy loading is now good enough to be considered optimal The problem is that Google Page Speed dings you for not having lazy loading, and people

browser-native lazy loading is now good enough to be considered optimal The problem is that Google Page Speed dings you for not having lazy loading, and people add crappy JavaScript lazy loading that satisfies Google, but makes the user experience worse. WebP is good iff it improves rendering times (which it does). That's not google's fault really. The problem has been, until recently, Safari didn't support WebP, so you had to implement a fallback to jpg. More complicated HTML, more images to compress and manage, all for a very marginal improvement.