Recently I had a request to post a gif somewhere, and gifhy was the only thing that I knew was mostly legit. I tried directly uploading, but it didn't want to work.
Is there a better place, you'd recommend, to direct people to for gif uploads?
That's a difficult question honestly, as you'd want the host to be able to fund itself in a way that's tax efficient or otherwise incentivized (like not showing ads or using trackers in exchange for donations).
At the very least, https://imgur.com/ has a less crowded interface and surely makes enough money from ads and trackers to be sustainable in the medium term.