If you need to find something out, having to wait or randomly click through a video is extremely frustrating.
At the very least, give us a frigging transcript.
And imagine even a more aggressive "video summarizer" generating articles from videos with interspersed screenshots or brief video segments where they matter for the understanding...
It does have formal docs, but I didn't fully understand the program after reading them. I didn't enjoy sitting through branchless's videos or clicking around for the right point in time.
Edit: well, not (lossily) compressed in the case of a gif but not as nice as text properly rendered for your display.
vlc seems to do this (Android version).
I'll grant that the usual methods of interacting with GIFs don't do this, and am not arguing that they do. But if you really want a specific functionality, you can look for a tool which might provide that.
If you are showing off some beautiful TLI, an interactive prompt or ascii animations, this is the perfect tool.
As someone who works in film: film also doesn't lend itself to everything. Certain internal observations that work great in literature would be unwatchable on film etc.
Or to take it to the extreme: you don't expect the overview of an database to be experimental performance video art.
If you want to just show something off, a GIF (or real video) is the answer.
The defining feature of asciinema is that you can copy the text out of the animation. Which is actually not that useful most of the time, because you can't search for text in asciinema (AFAIK?) like you can in, well, documentation.
Why so? You can't pause or seek GIFs. GIFs and video files are usually several times larger than asciinema recordings of the same content. And you can't copy text out of them when it is useful.