I assume that the notification stating this change will soon become permanent means that the setting - which was added specifically because auto-grid by default wasn’t the right choice for every community - will then be removed. Is that correct?
To me, it’s still as annoying as it was back then. I often upload all my screenshots at once and arrange them within my post after that. Maybe that’s because I use a tablet, and the default preview is quite small, so it’s often easier to get all the screenshots I need into the post and use the preview in Discourse to decide which one belongs to which paragraph. But I often remove the grid tags because of that. That’s why I would still prefer to disable it on my personal forum (It would also be helpful for me to disable it on Meta, but I got used to removing them here; sometimes I wish I wouldn’t have helped to identify the bug causing auto grid not to work in non-English interfaces, that was kind of a feature for me).
Even if I wasn’t using the tablet for uploading, I don’t want information from the images to be hidden by default - it’s not always obvious how much you are missing without opening the lightbox. Carousel mode doesn’t really fix that, because there is no automatic carousel mode; the result of auto grid is still the grid just like before. I know there is a toggle button in the RTE, but in Markdown mode, you need to add that syntax manually. That’s even more work than removing the grid tags.
Also, you cannot see all information in carousel mode either. It’s kind of like the smaller version of using the lightboxes from the grid. You see one full image but not all the images. If a user shares multiple photos of their build, I want to be able to follow the wiring. To do that, however, I need to be able to see both the front and back of the circuit board and the photos of the other components connected to it at the same time - not one after the other, and not just parts of the photos. That’s why I think it would be best for the forum to keep this feature disabled in the future as well.