Some (all?) browsers will still play autoplay videos as long as there's no audio track (or if it's muted by default)

Yes, at least in Safari on iOS. If you properly mark it muted it will autoplay when asked.

I believe the user can change the setting to "Never Autoplay" instead of "Stop Media with Sound" but the default only affects with sound.

Have you tested if that works in low-power mode? I know low power mode usually disables autoplay, and a lot of users have it on for significant parts of their daily usage

Low power mode doesn't affect autoplay for me in Safari

I’m curious, would you disable GIF autoplay if the browser’s settings offered it?

No.

Like, i get that they are the same in effect, but I still believe in the semantics different between a moving picture, and a audio-track-less video.

A gif can never have audio.

A img tag can never have audio.

mp4s, m4as, webm, embeds tags, video tags, etc, can either have or not have audio, its a surprise.

Because they are videos, not moving/animated pictures.

Anywho, apng is a real standard now, so one can just use that instead of gifs.

Yes. The performance of playing gifs is awful. Even better if gif autoplaying could be gated by the dimension of the gif. Under 100x100? That's fine, autoplay it. But some nutjob's 1000x1000 gif? Please spare me.

Yes please.