You are totally right. I would just add that the meme "designers are rockstars and vital to the information age" doesn't originate from Google. It originated

You are totally right. I would just add that the meme "designers are rockstars and vital to the information age" doesn't originate from Google. It originated from designers themselves. The designers have now fully infected Google... None of these problems are new. People have now contemplated them for an entire generation in science fiction books and movies, video game interfaces, CAD interfaces, music instrument interfaces, art, Xerox, Media Lab, etc. Really though, animated interfaces are a short-term fad which is subject to boom and bust cycles just like 90s icons graduated to high-res icons and then back to microsoft tile icons. When peoples' hardware can no longer handle the animations and they learn to associate animation with skipped frames, impeded workflow, etc., the cycle will revert itself.