My complaints about what people actually do are unfair, because you can imagine things being different? Load a page with a video which doesn't play immediately and a gif which doesn't play immediately, and it's annoying for both, then leave it for a bit and the gif will very likely load then loop so I don't miss it when I look back, the video is as likely to play then autoplay the next 'related' video so if I don't wait, I do miss it. Gifs tend to sit inside a mobile page while loading, then play in-place ready to be scrolled back to. Videos tend to fullscreen when played and then have to be waited for, or start playing tiny then have to be fullscreened and restarted to watch. Gifs tend to scale with pinch-zoom, videos don't. It's not that the gif file format mandates that they must loop, or that video codecs mandate playlists, but that's what people actually do with them and all those things together make videos a worse experience for anything which doesn't need to be long form video.

Authors don't need to put ads in videos but they do. I have never seen a gif say "an error occurred, try again later" when I try to unpause it, like YouTube says several times each day for videos I paused yesterday. (inb4 "works on my machine"). Authors could replace gif frames with ads but they generally don't, and haven't done so for years.

> Your twitter complaints for example is completely invalid, gifs cannot play sound at all

Excellent. This means I a) never miss something in the audio track, because there isn't one. b) never have to take action unmute a gif. c) never have to mute music and unmute a gif and rewind it just to find out if there is audio to miss or not. d) Nobody ever says "don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell, thanks from my Patreon sponsors like xxSwagMaster, buy my merch and smash that like button" on a gif. This means gifs can't be a replacement for all video, nor am I suggesting they should be; only saying I prefer to err on the side of gif more than most people, because the experience is generally less annoying (not completely annoyance-free).

> I find it very frustrating to have to wait an entire loop to wait for an instructional gif to start from scratch

Me too. It would be neat if right click -> reload image, restarted it, or if there was a restart option in the right click menu.

> with videos you can auto-play on scroll

You can also be listening to a Twitter video, scroll it juuuust off screen, and have Twitter decide you must have gone deaf as well and pause playing. You can also no longer watch a YouTube video and lock your iPhone to keep the audio playing, like you could a few iOS versions ago. This is nothing to do with video codecs per-se, it's just part and parcel of video on the web and the companies which control it and the things people do with it to grab control and commercialise and overreach. Apparently nobody cares about gif enough to do that kind of thing with it - or it's so limited, there are fewer places to do that kind of thing.

> Btw. your favorite vs-code website stalls in my browser, spins up my fan and scrolls really sluggishly because of all the gifs.

"That thing you like, sucks" - well, different things for different people.