It's the left-to-right ordering that's the problem. I'm fairly sure there's no way to order things left-to-right in this layout without inevitably having to ski

It's the left-to-right ordering that's the problem. I'm fairly sure there's no way to order things left-to-right in this layout without inevitably having to skip around haphazardly. In a magazine-style layout, wouldn't you read the columns top-to-bottom first, then left-to-right? You can accomplish that already in CSS with either 'columns' or vertical flexbox. Another issue with this 'masonry' layout is the ragged edge at the bottom. In a magazine that would presumably be justified -- again something you can do with columns or flex. On the web, I guess there's a hidden assumption that you'll have endless scrolling content, so it doesn't matter what the bottom of the page looks like? If so, that's not necessarily something that should be encouraged.