Given that the developer was about 7 years old when the BLINK tag was inflicted on the world, I'm going to forgive him for this. But really, this is a lot of HTML/JS/CSS evolution just to get back to what is effectively BLINK.
What about all of the UI animations built into jQuery and other frameworks these days? Sliding, pulsing, hopping, etc. all provide essentially the same purpose, to guide your attention to a particular element as it changes. I don't see anyone clamoring about those being the second coming of the evil BLINK tag.
The problem with the BLINK tag was the fact that anything wrapped in it would blink continuously, for as long as the page was loaded. I don't think anyone is suggesting that this plugin should be used to continuously rumble anything on the page, any more than anyone thinks jQuery.slideToggle() should be called in an infinite loop to slide something up and down continuously.
It's a design element that should be used sparingly and for a limited time to grab the user's attention in an interesting way. Nothing more.
There's a difference between the potential to do annoying things, and actually _implementing_ annoying things. I'm sure there were non-annoying ways to use BLINK, too, but that doesn't meant that it wasn't mostly used in a bad way.
In the game Heavy Rain, buttons for actions that have serious consequences will rumble slightly. In very strained or tense scenes, they rumble a lot. An analog on the web might be the hover style for a button that deletes things with no undo.
