I like snappy as much as the next guy. But then I switch to another UI and find myself delighting in animations (the very ones the author deprecates). Animation disguise loading times or make them more bearable. They're useful for conveying semantics of actions and relationships. If you choose animations thoughtfully and time them well or make them opt-out, there shouldn be no problem.

I'd also like to address "big fonts": I grew up with UIs from the turn of the millenium and back then I thought professional software had to show a lot of things on the screen and have extensive menus. But I also noticed I could burn a CD much more easily using a free wizard-like version of the burning program than the paid full version. Thanks to mobile, at the price of shortening applications to apps, the world got easier, friendlier, cleaner UIs. While we previously thought that reducing the font size on our websites made them look cooler, now we saw that using big fonts we could make text look good while actually being radable.

So let us not go back to terminals maybe. Let us use the right (visual) tool for the right job.