Kinda scares me that After Effects (video manipulation tool) will be used for web animation.
Photoshop all over again?
.ps: I'm in the same boat of having to learn AE. Or at least improve on my basic knowledge of it.
I very much admire people who are adept with it, and sometimes when I watch the opening sequences in films, or certain types of adverts on television, I can even imagine how they might have achieved it with AE - but for me it was a great relief when I never had to use the damn thing again.
(I spent about a year maintaining a proprietary ActionScript library that would render AfterEffects animations - not dissimilar to Lottie, in fact, except almost certainly a whole lot worse, especially the bits I wrote given that there are probably some horses who understand AE better than I did.)
It was originally a post processing tool. Hence the name. After Effects.
Which is why this whole thing seems so similar to me.
It's a player for vector-based scriptable animations after all.