It would be helpful if you shared a brief summary of your current workflow as absent that it's impossible to gauge whether what any of us does might be objectively less painful.

Myself? It's not something I really bother with except on rare occasion, so I'm totally content with having installed FFmpeg via Chocolatey (a la choco upgrade ffmpeg-full -y --pre, a single PowerShell command which will update ffmpeg if it's already installed, or install it if it isn't) and then I just open my bookmark for the WebM Wiki's VP9 Encoding Guide to help me remember which flags to pass to ffmpeg to create the kind of file I want in Windows Terminal. I also have Handbrake installed for the even rarer occasions that I feel motivated to isolate a segment of a larger video to turn into a WebM animated image, though if I've already determined the start and end timestamps I'll just pass those to ffmpeg on the command line as part of my usual workflow.

You could try ffmpeg from the terminal:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 out.gif

I'm on mobile ATM so this may be wrong.

That's what I generally do.

You can check out Instagiffer, though you are better off using .webp instead of .gif.

there are a load of websites you can upload the video file to and it'll give you a webp, they seem to work well