Definitely doable on desktop.
IMO, if you're doing animations on mobile web you're targeting a higher end phone anyway (since you'd be crazy to do anything fancy with mobile web on a constrained device) it's less about execution speed and more about GC at that point. If you can't hit 60fps with this technique I think we need to fix garbage collection, not use a different set of animation primitives. But lots of very smart people disagree with me.
I also was sceptical at first but apparently achieving 60 fps witch this approach is possible and has the interactivity advantages you mentioned.