Something taking over my interface and locking me into its narrative, explaining instead of showing annoys me 10x more. An animated gif can loop so I can watch it twice.

Problem with animated gifs is that they are not very efficient in terms of bandwidth, especially if you need them to show UI interactions (which means you need a high frame rate).

The word "gif" now means both the format GIF, and also any generic short, looping video on the Internet. As a result, you can just use a webm or other format, as Gfycat does, since it's highly compressible and no viewer actually cares about the underlying format, only the content.