If you're still using Chrome you can right click the gif and show controls to get a pause. Sadly not supported in Firefox it seems.

There's a bookmarklet out there I just found trying to address this issue myself but I've not tested it so review and use at your own risk.

https://slbkbs.org/jsgif/

Firefox supports stopping gif animations after one loop. Set image.animation_mode to once in about:config.

Better but not quite as good as Chrome's gif player which lets you seek and pause etc.

Thanks for the feedback! Glad you enjoyed. Point taken on the GIF, and I'll bear in mind. It's a bit of a balance; I don't like using too many embedded YouTube videos because that can spam readers with ads.

The GIFs were great for illustration, you're describing something in the time domain so an animated example is useful. The problem was those GIFs. The towers level with the camera movement and planet moving in the background was just way too much motion alongside text I was trying to read.

Maybe try putting more white space between the images and blocks of text or put several images one after another in a group. Then I could see the examples but read blocks of text with no distractions.