Enable replace image feature in LibreOffice
LibreOffice is the same office suite that has been shipped in previous Ubuntu releases. Many of LibreOffice's first improvements were patches from the go-ooo project which were already being used in major Linux distributions. If expected and optimal behavior changed from one release to the next that is a regression and you should file a bug about it.
The OpenDocument Format is actually a zipped XML format. It may be possible to write a script to replace the images since you are having to repeat the action so many times.