Prepare for endless frustration as designers start implementing artificial 5 second delays while you wait for a pretty transition between two states of a page.
This might be less relevant to power users, but imagine someone accidentally clicking somewhere and suddenly facing a full-screen video. With the transition, it's at least clear what action is happening. It's similar to buttons indicating their state (hovered, pressed, clicked).
The main reason animations can get annoying is that people don't get the timing right (too slow), or really just use them to show off. Some even use transitions to gloss over the slowness of their system, which is infuriating.
This is it. 90+% of animations I see fit into this category.
Apple is notorious for this [0]. The animations on Macs and iDevices are so painfully slow and unnecessary.
[0] Just one recent example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254333888
Is that anything to do with our users' age group?
1. are strongly/over-opinionated
2. are power users - most of these design choices are inherently less functional than alternatives
3. understand that these things aren't just "the way they are" but are intentional, explicit things that designers & co. want and will push for over how things used to be as well as the status quo
Otherwise, yeah, totally agree. The modern web is infuriating in many ways. All praise to reader view, ublock origin, and vimium.
The modern web and app space is just filled with minor annoyances that individually are probably fine but that add up to a sort of aggregation of frustrations and feelings of being manipulated that is hard to put a singular description to. I get this sentiment in both age groups that I have high exposure to. It's not really about hating new trends because we're just old and comfortable with how things are (or were).
That's my feeling lately. A lot of UX lately doesn't seem to be designed to empower or assist the user but to push them into a direction that's good for whatever the company wants.
They apparently introduce video codecs with plans for deprecating and then removing them. Literally breaking all sites on the web which rely on that codec.
That, to me, perfectly encapsulates their philosophy of introducing new features without committing to maintaining them. They don't view the web as something that's worth not breaking, they seem to only value the actively maintained part of the web which has enough resources to stay on top of Google's treadmill.
It's even worse than that. They force hardware manufacturers to adopt their codec on pain of retribution: https://www.protocol.com/youtube-tv-roku-issues
Drop the codec, oops, your devices are obsolete, there's nothing we can do about it
Either way, you can disable transitions on your OS already if you dislike them. In fact, you should see this as an improvement to the current situation, as transitions bound to OS animation preferences instead of jQuery .animate() will suddenly disappear for you.
Give developers a standardised interface they can use and they'll use it; give users settings for those interfaces and you can make applications work like you wish with the click of a button.
The only time people consciously think about UX/design is when something horrific happens like the most recent Gmail redesign or the Netflix autoplay on hover.