Comment by jdiff
2 days ago
There's odd cases where it still has uses. When I was a teacher, some of the gamifying tools don't allow video embeds without a subscription, but I wanted to make some "what 3D operation is shown here" questions with various tools in Blender. GIF sizes were pretty comparable to video with largely static, less-than-a-second loops, and likely had slightly higher quality with care used to reduce color palette usage.
But I fully realize, there are vanishingly few cases with similar constraints.
For those you can often use animated WebP, or even APNG. They all have close to universal support and are usually much smaller.
If you need animated images in emails or text messages, GIF is the only supported format that will play the animation. Because of the size restrictions for these messaging systems the inefficient compression of GIFs is a major issue.
I am not sure "need" is the right word here.
AVIF works here also. Discord started supporting it for custom emoji.