I agree that in this case the animated parts of the graphics were not needed, it's an easy pitfall to be distracted by the beautiful aspects of visualisations when crafting them.
I feel the need to defend the author though, it's hard to make research accessible while still distilling valuable insight. I think his post on transformer networks [1] did a good job for example, and you'll appreciate the lack of animations.
Yes this seems like an early work in progress, compared to Jay's previous Transformer articles.
In addition to your link, I've found a really good Transformer explanation here (backed by a Github repo w/ lively Issues talk): http://www.peterbloem.nl/blog/transformers
I feel the need to defend the author though, it's hard to make research accessible while still distilling valuable insight. I think his post on transformer networks [1] did a good job for example, and you'll appreciate the lack of animations.
[1] https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/