svg - without smil, is gif my only option?

Question

So I've recently encountered this warning

SVG's SMIL animations (<animate>, <set>, etc.) are deprecated and will be removed. Please use CSS animations or Web animations instead.

Doing as much research as I could, I keep finding excuses about replacing SMIL with web animations (which SMIL is if we're being technical) but this all involves JavaScript and CSS. I use animated SVGs in <img> tags because that's the point of the SVG format: it's an image.

This was really nice and all because it allowed me to at least organize my images on a web that's notorious for being a giant mess (e.g. JavaScript has no imports so you have to fill the global scope).

Now that I can't animate with SVG, is GIF the only option for self-contained animations?

Answer 1

SMIL is not as dead/deprecated as you believe it is. The Chrome developers recently posted this:

We value all of your feedback, and it's clear that there are use cases serviced by SMIL that just don’t have high-fidelity replacements yet. As a result, we’ve decided to suspend our intent to deprecate and take smaller steps toward other options.