Zend certified PHP/Magento developer

Magento 2.4: How to show scaled images in a product list or grid?

I have 300×300 image size for “Small” images, which shown in product list and grid views. The issue is that my goods contain text and it barely visible on optimized 300×300 pictures. Changing uploaded images quality from 80 to 100 didn’t help. And I’m not ready to WebP.

So I want to try to use 600x600px pictures, but leave product image size 300×300, so bigger picture will be fitted into smaller div and scaled by browser. In this case image quality became much better then with original size (I verified it using Chrome DevTools).

But I can’t find a way how to do it. Changing width and height in “view.xml” is also changes the layout block size to 600×600. So, what is the proper way to configure size only for “small” images (used in grid and list) without changing picture block size?