Honestly, my first thought was to port the code to ES6/CSS3 because I also share the belief that the code can be as concise if not moreso; however, I still think what the author did was a good solution.

I think the tradeoff is if you want to delegate everything (animations and DOM manipulation) to one language using a single library or split things up into two languages with no libraries. I prefer splitting things between JS and CSS, but I'm impressed with how clever, concise, and expressive using jQuery can be.