Yes, the hovering dots were mostly just a visual attractor for rewind. It was there to get people to click on their avatar, open the notification panel, and see that rewind was available to view 
Once you click through to the rewind page, that animation will no longer load, but it does require a refresh. Since this was just an experimental plugin, we didn’t go too deep in storing this data on the user in the DB. We just opted for local storage.
So if you really want to see it appear again, you can remove discourse_rewind_2024_dismissed from your localStorage for meta.discourse.org