KeyFrame Animation in 2026- creating Fire with CSS!

When I began my journey into software design, I attended an event where an alum of the program I was considering was presenting a project they had worked on, and they mentioned working with @keyframe animation. This perked my ears, as I had studied animation all through my high school years into college, and I still dabbled a bit in my spare time. This was... not the same thing at all. Kind of the same, but not really. Most of the programs I used for 2d cell by cell hand drawn use the word 'keyframe' to describe the endpoint of a path created by the element you are animating- you use them as sort of 'footholds' while creating the motion/color/shape changes that take place 'in-between them'. I was expecting this as well for the css property- and while that is sort of the same thing, that you create a change that will be executed at the point of time you designate, css is NOT animation software, and all of those 'frames' need to be either css properties individually managed, or static im