All that time and effort put into the animation feature only for it to be abandoned feels like a big waste to me.

And yes, the animation feature in Windy was much smoother than those in any other website or app I know of. Not only that, those smooth animations could show both both rain and thunder (the lightning symbols) together - something that no other website or app I'm aware of, can do.

Such a unique feature wasted.

https://community.windy.com/topic/32957/disabling-of-videos-download

Windy has lost a unique gem. Also the time and know-how to develop it fo far should vindicate the afford of some more hours.
(The first might be to copy & paste the code from the backup with a link in the menue.)

Meanwhile >83 milllion views, more than everything else together, there seems a lot of use beyond my mind. Maybe they even prevented some cats from getting wet.
I just used it to communicate the summaries of hours of meditations about eg. geophysics of airflow or development of severe hotspots and tracking SO2 from volcanoes, if time & the bugs allowed it.
It was also very convenient to catch some radar-issues.
Now let´s finally continue Windy´s own satellite project and defeat the bossoid-bug.

@Suty , Caefix made a great point - I hadn't even noticed that animations thread had over 83 million views.

Maybe compared to the most widely-used features but to me, that link shows there were more than enough people using it to warrant keeping it.