literally every grad student in science fields - they don't care about video compression or download quality - and gifs are fast and easy to make and simple to grok and come out with straightforward and predictable fidelity.
webm's are smaller and ffmpeg can convert any gif in a breeze.
They don’t care, and their PI will find a way to complain about it not playing on Word ‘97.
Still cannot look at an embedded .webm on my iPad in Firefox.