I don’t emerge from bushes with secret plots often enough

Because it’s giving you the option to do both but there’s no reason to use gif any more, it is obsolete. WebP is no jpegxl, but it’s better than gif.

They aren’t developing or maintaining the core browser though, they depend on Firefox still being looked after.

This new policy doesn’t apply to Firefox forks so you’re better off with one of those

This is about competance and leadership decisions, not moral equivalence fallacies.