These dummy sheets help editors estimate the number of column inches necessary for a given newspaper or magazine page.
They show you where to place your images for that particular layout.
It allows the designers to account for color palettes and image sizes until the permanent images become available.

Robin James / Getty Images
The images only pop into the placeholders after they’ve been fully downloaded.
To see the high-resolution image, you must manually override the image or tweak the program’s tweaks.
Open-source publishing tools, like Scribus, behave similarly.

They support placeholder images during document editing to reduce processor overhead and streamline the text-review process.