You can actually make a working masonry layout with css alone(even make it work with browser resize), if you do know the aspect ratio of each item. The hard part is handling the column count change and item prepend/insert because that would always require js to do.(since tha would change the position and column of every item)

There is no logic of js required to do handle whatever screen resize.

https://codepen.io/mmis1000/pen/gOyZJqE