Why?

Perhaps it's a form of hipster irony, since by and large all GIF sites and social media sites now convert source GIFs to mp4.

There are still plenty of contexts where you can embed images but not videos (or at least not with automatic looping playback) - forums, github README.md, other markdown-based comment/post systems.

Gif compression limitations also encourage you to cut down to the essential parts - too many videos waste the viewers time with delays and irrelevant bits.

> irrelevant bits

Hmm.

What's more confounding about this than translating between any other two formats?

GIF is a terrible format for video

But it's the only common video format that can be treated like a static image in most cases. Like any other format, it's got its ideal use case.

Animated webp is commonly supported at least on he web these days.

Of course, it too is a horrible video format, which is impressive considering it is based on a not nearly as horrible video format. If only browsers would support silent looping video in <img> and CSS image contexts...

> Animated webp is commonly supported at least on he web these days.

Sure-- if it's a) a website that b) you're making. Tons of websites that allow user uploads only allow common static image formats-- jpg, gif... maybe png, maybe bmp, etc. I can't imagine anywhere that allows users to upload profile pictures, for example, would allow them to upload a webp, but I could imagine users wanting an animated profile picture. I've done it myself.

The whole point is that there are instances where using an animated gif is the only option if you want an animated image, and people want to convert videos to animated gif because of that. That's why FFmpeg does it. I'm not really sure why people find this so weird.

You can do that with ffmpeg, but the output isn't ideal

I'd use gifski: https://gif.ski/