While Firefox originally used transition effects for browser UI toolbar buttons, that was removed years ago in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1393057
Since the PDF.js viewer toolbar transitions were likely based on the Firefox ones, it seems reasonable that these transition effects are removed from PDF.js as well. Besides removing a bunch of CSS, this also makes the toolbar feel ever so slightly more "snappy" without these delays on mouse interaction.
(In order to make it more feasible to modernize/improve the viewer UI, trying to clean-up/simplify existing rules iteratively seems like the most reasonble way to make any progress here w.r.t. being able to test/review things.)