…just an update the link you provided and code snippets in it had no effect(as expected given I am dealing with background images) and google lighthouse was still complaining about all the need to defer all the background images in the color sections.

Now here is something weird.

After I gave up and moved on to decided to the footer page – which in this case has a google map; changing the way google maps work to user must accept to show google maps; the problem went away.

feels like there must be an incompatibility with the google maps section and lazy load; I have a test system in place in case you want to follow up.

thanks

https://web.dev/offscreen-images