I saw an article on some Cosmo-esque sex talk site which did the same thing. It was a listicle with stupid GIFs throughout. The paragraphs were about 8 words wide on my screen, and each GIF was as if they just typed the list item title into a Giphy search.

It is a bad trend. Memes are one thing... Animated ones are a way of saying "Look at me, not the content".

EDIT for extra observation: I blocked them in uBlock, which was nice. However, Reader mode in Firefox has them! And you can't block element in reader mode. Perhaps "disable animated GIFs" needs to be a checkbox for that feature in Firefox.