That's fair. I just feel like the cat is out of the bag on gifs. If all browsers rolled out something that blocked autoplay on every mp4 or webm regardless of audio being enabled or present, I imagine a good amount of users would feel like things had "broken even if they'd appreciate that videos on news articles don't autoplay at all (although they'd still be able to follow you around the page).
.gifs wouldn't make a site feel broken. We can't go back to actual .gifs (distinct from the layman's "gif") because they're an inappropriate format for the kind of gifs that people make today.
I think people might feel like the browser has "regressed" or "broken" if they have to press "play" on silent, looping videos that they used to expect to autoplay. Maybe broken isn't the right word. I'm just saying that I think many people expect silent .mp4s to work the way that .gifs work: autoplaying.
