Yesterday I heard of https://quickshell.outfoxxed.me/ but have never tried it myself. They have some pretty decent examples of widgets on their homepage. I think they have their own little langauge called QML which appears to be turing-complete.
Waybar uses GTK stylesheets for the theming. In theory, GTK CSS does have support for transitions and animations, which could be used in your case. But I'd say it's a hard sell still. That aside I've never tried them in GTK, so I wouldn't know if they even work in practice or how far.
I think you have a shot at this with eww instead. But it's harder to work with and you'll need to make somewhat complex scripts I'd imagine.
NOTE: Waybar has a built-in module for showing temperature, it's just that I couldn't make it work for me and that's why I have a custom module to show CPU temperature. I recommend that you try the built-in one first (since it might work on your machine) for more minimal setup.
Yeah I usually love Python but right now I'm working on a paid project where I need to deal with tasks that are critical to mostly work on first try. Now, if it would be a different matter if my code was just completely idiotic and still worked but Python doesn't error even when there is obvious typo that any statically compiled language could've picked up on a breeze at compile time.
I am scared to even implement a better logging system in my program because sometimes I forget to sanitize the arguments and my program fucking crashes at runtime because I added a new fucking logging statement.
I so fucking wish I had static type checking right now. The libraries I am using doesn't have types (via annotations) so unless I spend days fixing their shit, I will have to continue with these shitty runtime crashes for the shittiest small mistakes. I also can't trust these annotations because even if they are "wrong" their code coul perfectly work fine and they could even ship the wrong types. I would have the burden of dealing with their shitty annotations if that happens.
Yesterday I heard of https://quickshell.outfoxxed.me/ but have never tried it myself. They have some pretty decent examples of widgets on their homepage. I think they have their own little langauge called QML which appears to be turing-complete.
Maybe that's what you're missing.