Indeed: one of the first things I do on a new android phone is activate developer mode specifically so that I can set the animation timescale to 0×.
It also doesn't matter whether it's true if the majority or not- "Instant transitions are only good in theory" is not a true statement. Instant transitions are good in practice for many people and that has been true for decades.
Maybe software programs got faster with our faster CPUs but all the animations just made everything feel slow.
Probably because I had run into some apps with bugs when animations are disabled, and making them run twice as fast as normal is more compatible and reduce the annoyance enough that I forget its enabled. Apps that animate at normal speed in defiance of my settings get deleted.
But I also set windows not to show window content while moving or resizing, because I find that to be annoying too.
Reducing duration or eliminating animation is one of the first settings I do on a new install.
Your experiences are not universal.
(I use accessibility -> reduce motion, personally. less flaky than the dev options, though also less reliable)
AOSP is not the only operating system that allows you to disable animations, even if its implementation is not the best. And yes, I still use 0x on my Android, because it's still that much better than having animations enabled.
Though it does kinda often make inertial scroll/pan very bad feeling, as it jumps ahead of where you released, to where it will settle. "Reduce motion" is dramatically better there, which is a big part of why I use it.
Much MUCH more problematic is that Android (on a Pixel) has had a badly broken "recent apps" view for years now, when you have both a third party launcher and reduce motion enabled. It frequently (literally most of the time) gets stuck in its animations and won't scroll anywhere except to leap to the start or end of the list.
It's not a litmus test, you are simply wrong in the way you dismiss other people.
Some of us like it at 0x, even when some apps are janky. Further, plenty of us here use desktop operating systems. Android is not the only way to get on the internet.
Both Windows (at least as of 10 and before) and most Linux distros allow you to disable animations too, and it works fine. Desktop operating systems ~15+ years ago lacked these animations entirely.