Kinda odd they didn't call it masonry given it's already been called that forever. At least grid-lanes is reasonably self explanatory.
The naming was half the discussion on implementing this. There were a lot of people smarter and more knowledgeable than me that had a lot of opinions on the name that I hadn't thought about. I remember one of the reasons was that the word "masonry" wasn't as obvious a concept for non-English speakers.
I'm pleased they rename it because grid-lanes opens up more than masonry layouts.
I've been waiting to be able to have a fully responsive layout (where interleave sidebar content in with the page content on small screens, but have it in a sidebar on larger screens) without using any JavaScript, and this finally makes it possible.
Demo: https://codepen.io/pbowyer/pen/raLBVaV
Previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46228993