A behavior being unchanged for 30 years is hardly user hostile. It's reliable and trustworthy. Like a good tool should be.

You used to be able to press the escape button to stop GIFs on the page. It's not unchanged for 30 years.

Browsers have changed, a lot, in sad and unfortunate ways like you mention here, but the gif format is pretty stable.

Any application that doesn't allow me to stop something from being annoying, will be stopped from being annoying by being uninstalled.

If browsers made it such that I couldn't not stop .gif animations (or playing video, or...), I would trash that browser.

Bluntly, you do not get to control my computer.

The point is that they are more images than videos. They have no possible way to contain sounds so the annoyingness is limited to having unwanted images in your browser. You can tell your browser to block a particular still image. You can do the same thing to block a GIF. You don't need a pause/play feature on a 2-5 second sequence.

No, the point is control. You have no idea what I need.

Most people require much less.

What is your current solution to autoplaying, unpausable gifs?

Case by case basis ublock origin and permanently remove the gif from showing up in my browser ever again.

If that 2-5 second animated sequence is smack dab in the middle of an article I'm trying to read, because the author is trying to be "cool" and "in with the internets" by including some popular animated meme macro? You bet your bellybutton that I need to be able to stop it from distracting my eyes from the text.

Human sight has evolved to be attracted to movement.