GIF animations will autoplay where video embeds often will not esp on mobile. For a looping low color vector animation it might not be too bad.
Video embeds can be made to autoplay, browsers typically don't block them if the video is muted, and JS can be used to nudge them along if they do.
With the automatic conversion of GIFs into video, this also isn't a property that can be relied on for GIF as an end-user. See Xitter, where their buggy scroll position detection takes over playing and pausing GIFs.