I guess so. Still, this requires more clicks by default for any overlay you want over your background image. So having this behavior default is not productive, in my opinion.
Take my case right now, for example. I have 20 pages where my hero section at the top of every page has this kind of overlay over a background image. Each page has 2 to 3 text elements, some of them another image and all of them at least one button (some 2). After this update, I have to go to every one of these pages and set a z-index for every element on these hero sections. And similar to any other new hero section I create from now on.
This is how it shows up after the 1.5.1+ update, on every single page like this:
EDIT
This has been reported here as a #bug: