Why are GIFs still a thing?!? I mean don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against short, audioless videos but why GIF?

GIF only provides a lossless per-frame compression so the performance sucks really bad. For example a 1 MB GIF converted to MP4 is only 100 KB.

So that's why they take longer to load and have so bad quality.

IMO they were dying some time back, but with improving bandwidth, and the rise of memes, it’s going to stay for quite a bit. Plus, for forever-looping animated icons, it’s be easier to have a couple of GIFs over a couple of autoload, autoplay, autoloop videos, that I can’t attach any hyperlinks to.

But who knows. Those things might become possible down the road soon, but it will stay for quite a while still.