More of a historic curiosity these days, the legal reasons to avoid GIFs 20 years ago don't exist anymore, the LZW patents have expired.
That being said, PNG always had much stronger compression, in addition to supporting 24- and 32-bit color. Nowadays, we even have WebP that usually compresses better than PNG, and compresses far, far better than animated GIF. Animated GIF is a pretty ugly hack to the format, very inefficient for many common kinds of animations (or full-blown video as it's often used now); I've found that animated WebP can produce files around 10% the size of GIFs.
That being said, PNG always had much stronger compression, in addition to supporting 24- and 32-bit color. Nowadays, we even have WebP that usually compresses better than PNG, and compresses far, far better than animated GIF. Animated GIF is a pretty ugly hack to the format, very inefficient for many common kinds of animations (or full-blown video as it's often used now); I've found that animated WebP can produce files around 10% the size of GIFs.