I agree with you in principle but is more nuanced than that, lets say an user taps a link they think goes to a gif, according to you there should be a play butt

I agree with you in principle but is more nuanced than that, lets say an user taps a link they think goes to a gif, according to you there should be a play button over the gif? You would be killing a lot of traffic for that site because that annoys users, or imagine a site with infinite scroll (ala twitter) with funny gifs, should the user have to click each single gif they want to watch? Plus keep in mind the users would save a lot of (maybe costly) bandwidth and battery if they used muted videos instead of GIFS so why use them?