I tend to agree with you, but apparently people _really_ like GIFs, irrationally. I built a service[1] that converts GIF files to HTML5 video (h264 MP4 + OGV) and people reacted very violently, arguing that "it's not a GIF". It makes me kind of sad, but oh well. It even has a simple embedding mechanism[2].
[1] https://mediacru.sh [2] https://mediacru.sh/docs