Question about blinkies and the like

I don't have a neocities myself (it looks incredibly daunting to set up) but I know a lot of neocities sites host pages for blinkies, buttons, etc.

I've known about blinkies for a long time but I've never used them myself. I see in a lot of site descriptions that in order to use them, you should use their links written into codes. I see that a lot of blinkies can just be saved as GIF files, and it seems a lot easier/more practical to upload them as images rather than to have to clog a textbox with a bunch of short code lines, but I wanted to know what the practical reasoning for this is? Because I'm sure there is one, and I'm just ignorant to it!

I wasn't sure if it was just a credit thing, or if a lot of people actually are using the GIF file versions, or what more there was to it. Thanks in advance, I'm learning!