Animation libraries for javascript are actually already pretty decent. You can find way better stuff out there if you want to stick with jquery.

But declarative animation libraries are severely lacking. React's paradigm is amazing whenever you can write stateless functional components. But animation doesn't fit neatly in this abstraction since you always need to track animation progress state. So if an item is change/removed from the state, you still need to hold on to the stale value long enough for the transition, track the progress, and then cleanup on animation completion. This gets messy really quickly!

I don't think there's a consensus on how to cleanly abstract this part out yet so people get excited when there's a new attempt.

We found the best approach that worked for us is to instead animate the values in the state tree directly, using declarative tween objects that are applied to the state tree on every requestAnimationFrame, instead of trying to mess with the React render process. Declarative animations are hard to do right, but this approach has worked well for us so far with https://github.com/Monadical-SAS/redux-time

I think react is overdue for more solid animation patterns, maybe that’s the thought? If you look at react/vx (awesome lib) and similar, they are still searching for/discussing best practices for integrating animations. Understandably since it’s a nice to have, but having some consensus on patterns/libs would allow maintainers to include animation work without fear of un-necessarily increasing bundle sizes etc.