Animations that block use input are the sort of stupidity that becomes evil in its own regard. There was even a calculator but with this. This is a massive failure at the management level; somebody actually codes these things, but that it's not caught anywhere before shipping shows that the wrong people are in charge.

I do not log-in frequently enough to remember how it behaves on log-in (even my laptop has ~90 days of uptime).

FWIW, moving away from GNOME 2.x to either Unity or GNOME 3 was a hard move to swallow, though in all honesty, Unity was better (though pretty buggy and laggy until the end)!

Besides waiting for animation, in Windows 10, if you type the password fast enough the first character gets selected and the second character you type will replace it.

This happens frequently.

Here's an example I encounter whenever I use Microsoft Teams at work. I go to "Add Contact", and the entire screen becomes a modal entry box into which I have to enter a name. There's a single entry field on the screen. It's not in focus, even though that's the sole action that I can perform at this time. I have to explicitly select the entry field with the mouse and then type. It's such a basic usability failure, I really do wonder what both the application developers and the testers are actually doing here. This used to be a staple of good interface design for efficient and intuitive use.