I hate to make my first post a complaint, but I'm quite shocked by the new mobile layout and even more so by the lack of negative feedback.
Imo, the new layout makes the website unbrowsable.
Sure, the desktop mode works fine, but what kind of layout decision was to crop all the pictures?
I don't just brag for its sake, I'm genuinely curious about the community's opinion on the square thumbnails.

Any layout decisions on mobile that significantly changes the way the site looks or acts are usually made because Google says we should, and our pages will stop showing or be placed significantly deeper in searches for mobile users if we do not comply. In this case, Google was complaining about Cumulative Layout Shift while thumbnails load. The only way we could easily fix this was to make all thumbnail elements the exact same size so we could render the rest of the site entirely around the thumbnails before they even loaded. We tried several other options first, but their automated scoring kept failing us, and it is literally impossible to get an actual person to review it, so we were forced to do it this way.

Thanks for a comprehensive answer. It's a fair move, considering all the trouble y'all have to go through to keep the site running let alone improving. I've always wished google painful death, good luck dodging their despotism.

I guess I meant "understandable move". I hope the best for your site!

So, if you just keep easy and simple forever Google will just kill you despite how much people is using the site? Damn.

Yes. All Google cares about is what the Almighty Algorithm says.

Why crop them and not resize them to a fixed width/height?

Like I said, we tried that, and their automated tester failed us. That time it was because really tall and narrow or short and fat thumbnails were deemed inaccessible. Google is annoyingly picky about mobile accessibility.

... picky about mobile "accessibility".

you're telling me google specifically requested "make the comment sections look shittier"?