Masonry / Grid plugins

Is there a good enough masonry or grid plugin? It should at least get the initial image sizes roughly right.

The plugins I tried end up with far, far too large initial image sizes (up to max image size, using original image file) and then just scale them down while fitting them in browser, resulting in very long loading times and quality degradation by browser down-scaling.

Sometimes I also need to add text/html/widgets as cells and configure the amount of rows/columns that each cell should occupy.

I am surprised that there aren’t (or least being unable to find) any good plugins/page builder extensions or even basic themes for this kind of now quite popular design pattern.

So WordPress posts are used as grid/masonry cells. How can the number of rows/columns be configured per post/cell and whether it is just an image that links to its attachment page or a full fledged post containing text or mixed content?