In Chrome 74 and Chrome 76 (Canary) with 'disable cache' checked in Dev tools, TweenMax will force a reload on the image animating when the class names are swapped or animating. In addition, there is a weird flicker that happens. The flicker could be a side effect of the force reload. See code pen. The code pen shows vanilla js and jquery working as expected. You can also look at the network to see the additional (forced) image requests.
Note: GSAP's images change because its forcing a reload. Every-time placeimg.com is called, a new random image is returned.