Space age is not a hard dependency, mod has the sprites baked in but you'll still need any feature flag to be active.

Functionality extracted from the poorly named https://mods.factorio.com/mod/platform-construction-only-no-construction-robots mod.

The initial version contains just the legacy option that plays the animation of that entity's size at that position to completion:
/c remote.call("space-platform-entity-build-animation-lib", "legacy", game.player.selected)
It returns a table containing all_scaffolding_up_at and all_scaffolding_down_at for your own mod to do extra logic in.

In the future there is more planned like configuring how long scaffolding stays up, removing it if the entity does, requests are open.

As mentioned on the mod the code was extracted from this mimics the animation near perfectly, though i'd be surprised if you notice a difference.