Android has a lot of gratuitous animations as well. To give an example, the Clock app on my Pixel animates the tab icons, which I find dumb and annoying.
At least macOS gives you the option to disable gratuitous animations with their accessibility settings. I'm hoping eventually Android will wise up and follows their lead.
> developer mode which comes with its own set of drawbacks
Not really, you turn on "developer options". There is no developer mode as such, just many separate options, all with defaults that don't change things from non-developer behavior.
I have animations set to 2x regular speed, it's nice.
At least macOS gives you the option to disable gratuitous animations with their accessibility settings. I'm hoping eventually Android will wise up and follows their lead.