The GIF is older than the modern internet. It was built in 1987 by a team at CompuServe, back when dial-up modems made every kilobyte count and full color photography online wasn't really an option yet.
It was built for a different problem than the one it solves today
The original format compressed simple graphics and basic animation for slow connections. It was never designed with looping stickers, memes, or reaction images in mind, those uses came decades later. It just happened to be the one animated format every browser, app, and operating system agreed to support without asking twice.
Better formats exist, and always have
WebP, APNG, and now AVIF all beat GIF on file size and color depth. TikTok itself skips GIF entirely and uses WebP for stickers. None of that has mattered much, because compatibility beats quality almost every time on the internet. A slightly bigger file that works everywhere wins over a smaller one that only works in some apps.
The compatibility that keeps it alive
Discord, iMessage, WhatsApp, email clients, Reddit, basically every messaging platform built in the last fifteen years handles GIF natively, no plugin and no special support needed. That's forty years of universal agreement nobody's eager to break, even with better formats sitting right there mostly unused by the people sending them around.
What probably happens next
Modern platforms already quietly convert uploaded GIFs into short muted videos behind the scenes, Twitter and Tenor both do this, to save bandwidth while still showing you something that looks and behaves like a GIF. The format's name has basically turned into a generic word for "short looping animation," regardless of what file type is actually doing the work underneath. That's probably how it survives another decade. Not by staying technically relevant, but by staying impossible to fully replace in how people talk about this stuff.