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This does seem to be a good opportunity to retire the obsolete and wasteful .gif format ? (Or maybe at least limit it to maximum pixel area ?)

But you just meant looping animations, right ?

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.gif is better than video if you have a small area that changes on the picture frame by frame.

.gif can handle transparency.

.gif will never be obsolete.

Also dithering is an aesthetic!

GIFs can be highly optimised for tiny simple animations, but 99.9% of the GIFs that people actually want to send are not in that category. webm (for example) can handle transparency too, has cross-platform support, and better compression ratios than GIF for anything remotely video-like.

GIF is only wasteful if it's used as a substitute for video.

Which it largely is.

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