It is a very popular library that abstracts away the issue of fetching data from multiple local/remote sources and displaying them, managing in-memory and on-disk caches as well as synchronization issues and authentication (if images are not public). Its popularity stems from both ease of use and being well designed to integrate with the language features (such as coroutines) as well as UI toolkits (such as Jetpack Compose). On KMP projects it could not be used in commonMain due to its being available only for Android. In the future this will likely change, as the talk explains. There are already open source image loading libraries which support multiplatform, such as Kamel but - personally - I found bugs and (forgive me) a little unfriendly maintainers.