They brought you React so that there'd be plenty of bloat at runtime for their trackers to hide in. Seems consistent to me.

The person who made this post is likely not an engineer and is more focused on content and public perception than load times.

Of course, but who authorizes the launch page of a major new product to be published with no technical review? Or even, any review at all?

Does it feel right when you’re selling a device for visual consumption and the main animation takes forever to load, plays at 12fps while spiking up your CPU?

The "GIF" is a video. You are watching a bunch of advertising videos. 115 MB isn't really very much in that regard.

No, it's a GIF, in the file format sense.

Se for yourself: https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/01_Why-AR-Gl...

They have since optimized it and it now weights 23.5MB. Yey.

I just converted it to MP4 and it's 1.7MB. Hire me Meta, I can make your videos load 10X faster with a single ffmpeg command.

Is mp4 a drop-in replacement in practice for gif?

In most cases, yes. But even when it's not, I'd be hard pressed to justify 10X the size while having worse fps, colors, battery life, etc.