The only thing worse than modern Material is when there was a multi-year (?) period where Google didn't think buttons needed any affordance indicating they were buttons, not in shape, contrast, color, etc. and with touch UIs you don't even get hover feedback like you would on the web.

Reading between the lines, I can see that Google was inspired by the post-skeumorphic minimalism of iOS, but took the wrong lessons away from it. Some of that has been walked back, but far from enough.