I’m conflicted. When the video is so long that waiting for it to restart is painful, I think that an actual video with pause/play/seek controls is preferred. At the same time, it’s nice that it autoplays. For 100% text/CLI videos, I prefer Asciinema as it doesn’t involve downloading an 18MB GIF.
Alternate POV: I hate gifs in readmes precisely because of the autoplays. I find it incredibly difficult to read a block of text when there's a gif moving around directly above/below it.