That pretty much sums it up. jQuery animation can be pretty atrocious. Granted, CSS transitions/animations can also be atrocious if certain properties are being changed at the wrong times.

jQuery is going to select and manipulate elements, but it's not going to compensate for when the developer does moronic things like creating DOM elements a bajillion times with HTML strings in jQuery every time something changes, animating things in improper ways(like animating dimensional properties that cause extra redrawing before postrender), etc.

There's nothing wrong with using jQuery. I just find that I don't even need it and would much prefer to just use existing APIs in its place. If there's a compatibility issue, I can install a polyfill that's much smaller than jQuery ever will be.