When All You Can Do Is All or Nothing, Do Nothing – CSS Wizardry

When a design system or CMS cannot determine whether an image will appear above or below the fold, blindly applying `loading=lazy` or `fetchpriority=high` can actively harm performance rather than help it. Lazy-loading an LCP candidate delays the most important image; marking multiple images as high priority turns a useful hint into noise. The safer default is to omit these attributes entirely and let the browser use its own heuristics. These are contextual hints, not magic speed-up attributes, and they only work when applied with certainty. If a system gains enough context to apply them precisely, it should — but until then, doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing.