It depends though on the content page and on how slow the network is exactly, doesn't it? I often enough preferred to have the text already and decide based on that whether to wait for the images. Async with non-jumping base content (which the core web vitals also cover) is great for that.

And with it being a browser feature, even if Google pushes for it the user can always deactivate it. On real browsers at least.

Native lazy loading is broadly supported, it works well, has no overhead, and you can override the behaviour if you always want eager loading.

There's no point in complaining about it that I am able to grasp.

I don't have data on this but I assume that JS lazy loading is dying rapidly because this is not a critical feature that must polyfilled for legacy browsers.

Of course, plenty of sites will keep their JS lazy loading cruft until the next code refactoring / optimization.

But I am very happy that native lazy loading has been standardized and implemented.

I was critical at first as well. But I tested it on the site I linked and on other sites with bigger images, and it just worked that well that I stand to what I said. This feature is a net-positive and in most scenarios the loading will either not be noticeable, or it will be an advantage overall.