As with anything, I think material design can be done right or wrong. I don't like completely flat designs, and I don't like actionable objects that aren't immediately apparent as actionable. I do, however, like the overall look, as long as the functionality is done right.

One of my peeves is that it's sometimes hard to create business dashboards with high information density, since a lot of the material frameworks love their padding out of the box.

I dislike it a lot, and I'm otherwise mostly unopinionated about design. I think it has poor usability. It takes me a long time to process the odd placement of things like a "New/Create" button and the animations annoy me and feel distracting.

I initially really liked material because it seemed nice and clean but the animations have gotten out of hand, IMO, particularly when used on desktop. Is there a non/less-animated version?

I'm sure somewhere in the wide world of 6+ billion people there are individuals who agree with you :)

I think it's mostly ok on Android (except floating buttons), but bad on websites (even Google's own). And that mobile-like dumbification when websites look like my monitor is giant handset and most features and controls are removed as "unneeded for typical handset tapper" (most pages related to account management on Google, new Google photos with especially primitive controls).

I prefer previous design of Android (4.0-4.2) with slightly retrofuturistic aesthetics.

me. I think some of the animations are a gimmick and not a fan.