If there were only a way to render text in such a way that when clicked would instruct your browser to request and display a resource from another site. :-)
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.
I used to do the same, but I've had MacOS's default software crash with long-ish (about an hour) content. I switch to Open Broadcaster Software[1] after that; free and open source, and very well made. The learning curve isn't that steep, either, if you're just doing regular screen/audio capture.
For terminal based things I've been using `asciinema`. There are various options to play/render such recordings, such as to an interactive SVG. SVGs are lot smaller than GIFs in file size, and are even scalable.
Even better is ttyrec + tty-player for full self-hosting without a third party intervening. You get interactive playback controls and scroll buffer access while paused.
