Embedding third party services may go against the values of some Richard Stallman types, for me however it enables me to host behind cloudflare with a $5 a month digital ocean droplet and not have to worry about getting hugged to death. I can live with the tradeoff.
I stand corrected, not sure why i was under impression gifs dont work.
But as I said, it's unfortunate that comments sound and video have to be hosted externally.
In my mind , my domain is where I make the rules.
I do not want my self-hosted blog to be subject to flavour-of-the-month demonetisation, copyright and censorship of like 5 different teams. Think of youtube banning any video mentioning corvid.
Or audio. Or a gif, or comments. Sure you can host them elsewhere, but how many secondary services am I meant to use for a personal blog?
As i get older, I seem to be growing respect for legacy software: if people are still using it after 30 years, it probably got something right.