Correct way to animate UI/ control nodes

[emmdie]

Hey, I have a UI that consists of multiple Icons I would like to individually animate. Something along the lines of multiple hearts that show various states (full, recharging, broken...)
I have seen various approaches to animating these, but they all do not seem ideal. Is there another way?
Ideally, these would be placed in a container for flexibility and ease of use

• Animated texture rect: In theory what I want, but deprecated, might not be supported forever, can only add it through code now.
• Animated sprite. Not a control node, so it would require extra shennanigans like placing them in a margin container whose size I manually set. Not very flexible/seems hacky
• Manually animating a texture rect. Seems inefficient, also somewhat hacky and like there should be a better solution. Since the reason for the deprecation of animatedTextureRect is it's efficiency, i assume that would be worse if anything.
  Any advice would be appreciated