If it's only a few frames you might be able to arrange them vertically in a PNG and animate background-position to get the same effect for cheaper.

Correction: you want to use transform to force creation of a new rendering layer, then when adjusting the rendered position of the element using transform will not cause a repaint.

Ouch. What's wrong with APNG?

https://caniuse.com/apng

I figure it will have the same problem as GIF which is that each frame triggers a repaint.

It appears that every GIF frame is a Chrome paint (which makes sense) but a way to make the GIF static or turn off the GIFs would reduce paints down to basically nothing.