Yup, You are right about the uniformity, I can relate to it. Probably the sprite animation or Flipbook could take it more closer than this. I just utilized the particle technique to see how close the effect can go to this reference as well as serve the purpose of stylized explosion. I am looking to improve the particles behavior as well in the second pass. I felt like the outer ring worked really well there for the effect, I had to improve the shader script to achieve the better result there because in the first attempt it was giving hard edges.
Would love to gather more feedback and knowledge sharing from the community 