Hi Asia, thanks for your response, I can understand why it can be a bit confusing. I will try to explain it with my knowledge on this topic, if anyone has any comments, just shoot :)

SVG’s can be animated in three different ways:
- CSS keyframes
- SMIL, directly in the SVG
- Javascript

I think you are talking about animating directly in the SVG using SMIL. By animating directly in the SVG I could only accomplish very basic animations. Because I wanted to animate using After Effects, I chose to use the Bodymovin plugin.

Bodymovin exports a JSON file which uses the JS library to render a SVG animation. So it is rendered as an SVG animation, but you don’t get that as a file from After Effects.

I hope this answers your question a bit. You can read a bit more about this subject over here:

The following are the possible ways to create professional animations in SVG:

Bodymovin: Complex Animations — Simple Implementation

A Guide to SVG Animations (SMIL) | CSS-Tricks