News Web Part rendering issues

Is anyone noticing major rendering issues with the SharePoint Online News web part?

The issues are similar to this post...

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/sharepoint/changes-to-top-story-news-web-part/m-p/2586536

...but the impact is also on other 'Layout' types. It is almost as if Microsoft have broken their CSS or something, as the images used in news item banners are rendering as full size, rather than being cropped and having a gradient applied (to ensure text is readable in the web part).

My configuration of the web part is as shown below (or attached), and I can confirm that this issue is happening in multiple tenants, and mulitple site collections. In fact, I can't find any site collection where this issue ISN'T occurring.

Be very keen to hear of others experiencing this, and would be grateful if others could test this in their own tenants to see how widescale the problem is.

Thanks,

Joe