Every gallery plugin I tried for client sites did the same things. jQuery, a lightbox library, a slider library, 200+ KB of JS on every page, and PageSpeed dropped as soon as a gallery went on the homepage. Plus upsell banners in the dashboard.

So I wrote my own on top of core blocks and the Interactivity API:

- about 3 KB of JS to start; the lightbox/carousel code only loads when a gallery uses it
- no jQuery; the lightbox is just the native <dialog>
- the scroll reveal and hover effects are plain CSS
- it uses normal Image and Query Loop blocks, so nothing gets locked into shortcodes

It's free on wp.org, with no ads or nags: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wisp-gallery/

Full disclosure: I'm the dev. I'm mainly after feedback, especially from anyone who checks it with Lighthouse on a heavy page. And what's your current go-to for galleries that don't wreck Core Web Vitals?