Musocity,
There is no doubt, a picture with annotation is a thousand times better than a gif.
There are several issues with animated GIFs in particular. There's so often the challenge on any animation/video or even live demonstration, of seeing where the cursor goes. When it's under ones own control is seems easy to see, when someone else is controlling it, it whizzes off to somewhere on the screen and one has to hunt for it.
With GIFs in particular, there's also usually no start/pause/stop. Even using VLC a rewind goes straight to play and, of course, ose's looking at the buttons. not the video/animation. It's tricky.