I'm so tired of reading negative comments about entirely subjective (others might appreciate the gifs) and totally skippable if one doesn't like them (you can also ignore them) elements of a good post.
But saying "I hate articles riddled with gifs" is far from Marshall McLuhan and Edward Tufte.
Especially since it's not some shallow Buzzfeed post, but a detailed technical explanation of a programming-related issue that the author took time and effort to write -- which makes complaining about its presentation petty.
The author obviously wanted to lighten it up and add some fun elements. And he provided his opinion and expertise for free. These kind of comments can mainly serve to discourage him from writing more, not get him to "improve" his communication.
The gifs were actually causing Firefox to periodically freeze for me. For some reason it worked in reader mode, even though the gifs were still shown. This makes no sense to me, but in the end whatever was going on with the gifs initially caused the article to not only be unreadable but to negatively affect my entire browser. As such, I think it's reasonable to point this out in this case.
Luckily the article doesn't use any images for content, so disabling images for the page (or deleting them all via the inspector) was an option, and made the article far more readable.
I wish I had the magic power of being able to read text with an animated gif next to it without getting distracted every other word that some people apparently have.
