Post

...but you can also just set perspective on the parent as usual. The only thing to remember is that, when animating view transition pseudos, the direct parent of both the old and new images is the image-pair pseudo element: ::view-transition-image-pair(root) { perspective: 50cm; }

Neat! I'm actually glad to know this works, and the solution I found works too. Either way, this is a learning experience for all of us to be honest.