Have a look at the following two encodings of the same screen recording from the article, compressed to the same file size and the same framerate: https://tempklasjdf.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/most-engaging... https://tempklasjdf.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/most-engaging...

To my eyes the GIF version preserves a little more of the sharpness of the text but there's not much between them. And GIFs are simple and intrinsically support looping.

As an aside, there is currently a proposal to bring some features from GIF (and a few additional ones) to HEVC to better support screen recordings: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.71...

Colour palettes and efficient spatial (rather than frequency domain) coding are being considered, both features of GIFs. Also support for RGB colour space rather than YUV420 to better preserve the colours (just like GIF!).