Please don’t put a 10MB GIF in a page. Link to it instead, or better still to a video (GIF is an irredeemably bad format that no one should ever use any more).
IIRC there is no other option if you want to include animation in a GitHub readme, as it will only include image formats inline that way. Otherwise you could use a video, which for this content would likely be larger but would have the advantage of being able to not auto-play.
Of course "don't include animation at all" would be a valid opinion, though not one likely to meet with universal agreement.
Naive conversion will result in something much larger than the gif so not address the original complaint of "large chunk of auto-download/play content on the readme page".
> IIRC there is no other option if you want to include animation in a GitHub readme
Not the parent.
In any case, I wonder if it can be done with an embedded `video` tag. Maybe if the video is data URI encoded it could work?