Won’t the GIF also burn a ton of CPU? I’m not convinced it would actually be more performant than sliding textures around.
Here is a 640x640 gif: https://cdn-icons-gif.flaticon.com/6172/6172533.gif
That tab is using 4-5% CPU on my M1 Pro, and I also have a "GPU process" in my task manager, which is showing about 8% in the "CPU" column when it's onscreen. So, no, using a 64x64 GIF (1/100th the area of my example) you'd need to do this animation would absolutely not use any significant CPU or GPU. Which is why those worked very effectively to animate small icons with zero lag on the potato computers we had in 2000.