> Yes, there are much better options out there than using the animation jQuery offers.
No doubt. I haven't used jQuery to speak of in the past 2 years, and the only time I've found myself missing it was when I needed to do some simple animation and wasn't using a library like d3 that could do it just as easily or easier.
And yes, I mentioned CSS animations in this same thread. It's what I've been using in production for animation for the past 2+ years, although it sometimes feels wrong to animate things in JS by adding and removing classes from an element.