It's so jarring to read an article about the excrutiating effort put into design minutiae, and then see this garrish undismissable dialog cover the top third of the screen every time you scroll up (at least on mobile).
There seems to be a gigantic disconnect between well-intentioned design people and those who actually have to implement it and are incentivized to not care about the resulting quality (close the ticket, take the new one, go, go, go!!!).
Apple is the only big company I can think of that avoids this mostly successfully.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Roboto Flex is actually entirely unusable in practice.
But their products are simply bad, because while they realized that they can't really offer the same generality (customizability, flexibility) as tool usually offer in concrete products (eg GCP, GMail Workspaces, AdWords, Play store), they failed at product-market fit. (Yes, I know the numbers say that everyone and their dog uses Android/Play, and Ads, but neither is exactly a healthy market. For example when it comes to cloud infrastructure GCP is struggling ... because Google simply doesn't understand that overarching branding is made and unmade exactly through these fucking "small" things, like a bad call to action dynamic visual component.)
So probably the actual font is mighty fine...
These hidden hover popups should never impose themselves more than the amount you scroll back. They are much less annoying when they stalk you just above the scroll line and sit still.