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CSS doesn’t have to be evaluated by the browser
No. CSS is a language that you write your stylesheets in, which then have to be loaded, parsed and evaluated by the browser; see below.
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jQuery has to be evaluated by the browser
Yes, because…
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jQuery goes through a scripting language
Yes. jQuery is written in JavaScript which, like CSS, is a language which has to be parsed and evaluated by the browser; again, see below.
Doesn’t CSS have to be evaluated by the browser and also goes through a scripting language?
It has to be evaluated by the browser, but as a language in its own right, it’s implemented in native code similarly to the other core language features of a layout engine, like an HTML parser and a JavaScript engine. CSS implementation does not happen through a scripting language (unless, of course, the layout engine itself is written in one).
CSS styles are exposed to scripting languages via the CSSOM, which is not the CSS implementation itself, just a scripting API which you could consider as sort of a CSS equivalent to the DOM for HTML.
jQuery is written in JavaScript, which is then run by the browser’s JavaScript implementation. If you use jQuery to apply CSS, then jQuery has to access the DOM and CSSOM, which are again implemented in JavaScript, which the browser has to run.
This is similar to using jQuery selectors versus the native Selectors API. jQuery selectors are implemented in Sizzle, a JavaScript selector library, while document.querySelector() is a DOM method that allows you to use a browser’s natively-implemented selector engine directly from a script.