The web was always built to be adaptable to the end user device. The user agent was intended to act as the decision maker how to render the markup. For many years, browsers even respected the default foreground and background colors and font choices (sadly not many respect X resources anymore). CSS was designed to include an end user defined style sheet to override tiny fonts and other things that made web pages hard to read.
Not viewing animated banners isn't at all different from changing your base font, or not loading javascript. Had we chosen to call it "disabling" instead of "blocking" it would have been much more clear that this is an action that the user is and should be empowered to take. I do recognize that we're stuck with the loaded word for now, I just feel it's important not to forget that. The public discourse is dominated by media people, and their perspective is important too, but not more so than the technical one.