Why are you all so obsessed with hating jQuery? For me it just does the job done. Animate stuff. But I agree being totally dependant on javascript is bad for any website. Seen hundreds of wordpress spaghetti code where fancy effects were made with jquery like CSS opacity 0 and jquery animate to 1... What a bullshit. But yeah I still love jquery. Easy, fast and reliable.

I use opacity 0 and jquery to add a css class that animates the element to opacity 1 but I include different css file in noscript that overrides the original css and makes the element instantly visible, the only issue is I need to use lazy loading for images and it's done via data-src attribute and omitting the src atribute in the html... I guess it's not that big of an issue but certainly a bit annoying

Animating with regular jQuery is a terrible idea. So rough compared to CSS animations