Thanks @OSUblake, that example uses lottie, but I have had the same issue with images, where the image loads at the spot attributed by the page CSS, and the gsap animation kicks in a split second later, like in this example.
I have used DOM loaded events listeners, hidden the elements on load, etc... but thought I might be missing something as it seems to be quite a bit of workarounds
See this other pen> https://codepen.io/deborahvdev/pen/oNeRzVW
When the page loads, all the elements are there, then gsap kicks in and makes them transparent/animates them