I realized the chain of events may be: Kagi requests images -> dopanope delays images in some way -> images take longer to render, so Kagi loads more images -> some CSS issue comes into play when hundreds of images are loaded for one line, the math gets funny and they become slivers
I was curious about the errors from the console, so I checked if that generally happens if too many images are loaded at once, and it does. On a clean setup (no extensions running, everything working) I tried zooming out to a zoom level of 25%, and then scrolling, and I got the same 502 errors, as some of the images failed to load. So this is an unrelated event to be aware of!