Those tools are there to be used or abused... sadly. It goes both ways. Having these frameworks makes it a LOT easier for your average dev or low-skilled dev-designer hybrid (like me) to put together something quite a bit more usable than I would've been able to create a decade ago. It's a huge improvement from, say, WinForms controls with a bunch of human interaction guidelines. Most of the engineers and devs I've met are not good with UX and UI at all, and in that sense Material is a huge upgrade for them.
But yes, its ease of composition also facilitates dark patterns and the gamification of addiction, etc.
I don't know that is really Material's fault, though, or that iOS design guidelines would magically protect the user from user-hostile business decisions. Those are made long before questions of IA or "which UI widget do I use" come into play, popularized by evil advertising companies (yes, Google is one of them) and lootbox vendors and free-to-play-for-like-5-min-and-then-it-costs-a-limb pricing models.
FWIW, I'm not a diehard adherent of Material or anything. At work, I'm currently pushing for our company to NOT use Material for our iOS app, even though it'd be a lot more work, and even though I kinda like Material myself. It just doesn't seem like the right thing to force upon our iOS users.
That said though, for web especially, Material is a lot better than nothing at all, or vanilla Bootstrap for all but the simplest sites. Once you have to start designing custom data tables, autocomplete, chips, cards, etc., Material has put waaaaaaaaay more thought into them than your average team would be able to afford to. For small to medium businesses, it's a godsend... it's not usually a choice (for web) between Material and iOS design, it's just Material or some custom in-house thing that accounts for like 10% of the complexity. There are other web UI frameworks too, but not many are as feature-complete as Material.
If there were a similar framework from Apple, that isn't iOS/mobile-specific, I'd strongly consider that too (is there? did I just miss it?). Or even if you have specific examples of "Material says to do it this way, but Apple's way is better for the user because _____" I'd love to see those and learn.
And for Windows, ehhh... Microsoft gonna Microsoft, and the world will leave them behind. shrug
But yes, its ease of composition also facilitates dark patterns and the gamification of addiction, etc.
I don't know that is really Material's fault, though, or that iOS design guidelines would magically protect the user from user-hostile business decisions. Those are made long before questions of IA or "which UI widget do I use" come into play, popularized by evil advertising companies (yes, Google is one of them) and lootbox vendors and free-to-play-for-like-5-min-and-then-it-costs-a-limb pricing models.
FWIW, I'm not a diehard adherent of Material or anything. At work, I'm currently pushing for our company to NOT use Material for our iOS app, even though it'd be a lot more work, and even though I kinda like Material myself. It just doesn't seem like the right thing to force upon our iOS users.
That said though, for web especially, Material is a lot better than nothing at all, or vanilla Bootstrap for all but the simplest sites. Once you have to start designing custom data tables, autocomplete, chips, cards, etc., Material has put waaaaaaaaay more thought into them than your average team would be able to afford to. For small to medium businesses, it's a godsend... it's not usually a choice (for web) between Material and iOS design, it's just Material or some custom in-house thing that accounts for like 10% of the complexity. There are other web UI frameworks too, but not many are as feature-complete as Material.
If there were a similar framework from Apple, that isn't iOS/mobile-specific, I'd strongly consider that too (is there? did I just miss it?). Or even if you have specific examples of "Material says to do it this way, but Apple's way is better for the user because _____" I'd love to see those and learn.
And for Windows, ehhh... Microsoft gonna Microsoft, and the world will leave them behind. shrug