Glad to see that they don't want to mandate it. The big radar update they did a few years ago was a disaster (slow, no easy deep links) that they have backed away from.
And the most frustrating thing is that the links to the https://radar.weather.gov/ 'lite' version are only visible if you sucessfully execute JS. So the no-JS version is invisible to no-JS browsers. Whoever they had designing this front end had never heard of graceful degredation, let alone progressive enhancement. It remains an accessibility nightmare.
Weather.gov 2.0 will be more of the same.
I usually use the local radar gif though. My local office forecast pages link to the lite radars.
It's straightforward to take a peak at the available gifs:
And thank you for being persistent about raising awareness about how useful that national loop is.
Those are the wrong links for that purpose. What you want is e.g.
https://radar.weather.gov/station/knkx/standard
Reach these by scrolling down your local forecast.weather.gov e.g.
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=32.95528450000...
This isn't difficult. Keep the better thing running and run the new showy thing in parallel for whomever wants that.
The ridge gif loops load faster than the more complicated map starts to fill in...
The gif for an area covering a 2 hour drive in any direction loads in about a quarter second.
I probably got a little soured on it when they made it the primary path from forecast pages at a time when it was still quite slow.