Well good, for that was the only reason for the comment. The subsequent discussion was interesting, but somewhat beside the point.
Tiddlywiki includes some short-running animations, and they seem smooth in modern browsers. The only reason for discussing them here is that its one of the few useful reasons I’ve ever seen for setTimeout based recursions, and those were superseded years ago by better animation techniques. (I’m exaggerating a bit; there are other uses, as for an endless cycle that still allows for other parts of the code to interrupt; but they’re rare.)
The lowercase Operator has a last modified time nearly five years old, so I don’t think this is a new style.