Beyond Lottie I think that how your company is making tech decisions is bigger red flag… Just what you described seems crazy they can come up that solution just a few icons. I can’t imagine what it has to be for the rest. It’s unfortunately very hard to change once those type of people are in place and this culture is the norm.
I own the company, and the issue came to my attention in a 1:1 with an engineer last week. I can decide and communicate what the policy will be, and the matter will be settled.
The hard question as always is what constitutes a good policy!
What happened here was that a well-meaning and talented designer passed a Figma along to the dev team and the Figma included these Lottie things and a note about how to embed a chunk of js to display them. It caught the dev & myself off guard because neither of us had even heard of Lottie but I guess it might be getting popular with designers.
Considering that there actually seems to be an animated GIF embedded in the Figma file, I don't really know the intimate details of said designer's workflow and I think we just need to tell them "This Lottie player thing is not going on any website we produce, but an animated image certainly can, so is it prudent for you to alter your workflow? What is the optimal handoff step?"
I've been in one of those... You spend 4 hours removing half of the dependencies that are used in one line of code, the next day there are 20 more.