> Delight is overblown, in my opinion. I think most of the people truly delighted by fancy animation are just other designers.

I disagree with this, as much as I want it to be true. Just ask an Apple/iPhone user to use an Android phone for a week and then ask them how the experience was, they'll tell you something felt off or janky about it, and a lot of it comes down to really well designed animations on iOS for everything you interact with.

Regular consumers may not use the word delight to describe the user experience, but they do notice it when faced with what is (to them) an inferior experience.