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I’ve seen other people use "interactives", "interactables", and "explorables" (as in "explorable explanation"). Those feel a little forced to me.

At Distill we simply called them "figures" or "diagrams"; sometimes "interactive figures" or "interactive diagrams" when the distinction needed to be made.

Slightly off-topic answer: back in the day these used to be Java Applets so the original mathlets name is probably a pun on them.

One of my grad school text books had interactive experiments based on Java Applets. I occasionally go back to work through the chapters we never finished and running the applets is a challenge. I think the last time I tried, I ended up finding a command-line interface to run an applet outside of the browser.

Agreed, "applet" is a self-documenting word, it's a shame that it is confusing! Personally I like the word "vignette" although I haven't seen it anybody else using it that way.

I would call them interactive animations.