If you are fed up with Jetpack’s obtrusiveness, you might consider replacing it. One of the fine features I’ve seen in it is the image carousel with mosaic preview of the standard WordPress galleries.
Plugins I use and seem to be doing the job rather well are Tiled Galleries Carousel Without Jetpack, combined with Simple Lightbox. If you are using a modern version of WordPress, then you must be familiar with Gutenberg – the new content editor. Sadly, the Tiled Galleries Carousel Without Jetpack plugin is not actively maintained, so it does not work well with the new editor, which is why as a temporary workaround, you’ll have to install Classic Editor plugin too, in order to edit the posts or pages with galleries with it. It’s an inconvenience, but still a minor one.