The buffered cascade revealed tiles on an 80ms timer regardless of image
load, so the flip-in animation played on a gray placeholder and the thumbnail
popped in afterward. Worse, MasonryGrid ALSO applied a per-index
animation-delay (index×70ms) that compounded on top of the insert cadence,
so the cascade visibly dragged and desynced as it grew.
Now the producer preloads each queued thumbnail (decode pipelined ahead) and
the consumer awaits that decode before pushing the item — every tile animates
in fully loaded, strictly one at a time. Drop the compounding CSS stagger;
the store's one-item-at-a-time push is the sole pacer, so each tile animates
the instant it mounts. New utils/preloadImage.js (load+decode+timeout gate).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
