The post you showed in the screenshot does look fine to me both in classic and compact view on an instance with latest.
But I’d agree not all of your concerns have been addressed. I don’t believe redgifs work (well), so will try to look into that if possible, but might be out of my depth.
The playback continuing is interesting. I had made a change long ago to not download every time it was expanded / collapsed as before it would make a request every single time, instead I changed it to just hide and show it after the first load, so that sounds like a side effect of that. Perhaps there’s some way for me to also indicate to pause media, I will check
Just wanted to mention that some of the issues may likely have been due to issues with Mbin rather than on fedia’s side, and we put together an emergency hotfix last night / this morning. The issues had taken out another Mbin instance, so hopefully now that this instance has grabbed those fixes, there will be slightly less queue/db issues (I’d like to say all solved forever but I’ve learned my lessons).