Animated GIFs performing poorly on Storyline 3 vs Storyline 2

Hi, we transitioned from Storyline 2 to Storyline 360 at the beginning of January 2021 for our SCORM production.  Our SCORMs use a lot of animated GIFs and we have found that performance of these GIFs on the Storyline 360-published files is significantly poorer than on Storyline 2-published files.

We have built a test-case here for you to look at.  The first URL is a Storyline 2-published SCORM published to HTML5:

http://static-media.braincloudlearning.com/storyline_tests/G01T17_i_like_the_sea_story_2.0.2/story_html5.html

The second URL is a Storyline 3-published SCORM, a straight conversion of the Storyline 2 .story file without any additional changes and then published to HTML5:

http://static-media.braincloudlearning.com/storyline_tests/G01T17_i_like_the_sea_story_2.0.3/story.html

What we have noticed is that on Storyline 2, each GIF is loaded once and then cached for each subsequent use, while in Storyline 3, there is a cache-buster query string that is appended to each GIF asset.  This query string causes the browser to re-download the identical GIF asset from the server each time it is used in any scene.  Is there a reason for the cache-buster query string?  The SCORM worked perfectly before when published on Storyline 2 without having to redownload the GIFs each time.

Here is a screenshot of the Chrome dev tools Network analyzer (filtered for only GIFs) for the Storyline 2 output:

And here is a screenshot of the same content but published on Storyline 3:

Note, because of this problem, we have had to revert back to Storyline 2 and test and debug using our HTML5 publishes since the preview function is no longer available as that was using Flash.