What's the problem with animations? We have 8 cores with 3ghz+ and 16gb of ram to just render plain text?
There's no need to use the most extreme animations for minor actions in the interface, and the linked page is obviously a showcase, not a real application.
An interface should be snappy and get out of your way, not try to impress with pointless animations. That screams graphic designer trying and failing to do UX. Which is material in a nutshell really.
Sure, it may be prone to abuse, but the base theory is sound. By tapping into the perceptual abilities of movement and shadows, some parts of the inner structure and layout of the interface (which are usually only known to the dialog's developer) are exposed to the user in an intuitive way.
For us developers, a command line and vim (or emacs, not trying to start a war) can be the epitome of UX -- once we learn all those shortcuts.
But for users, there's a lot more that comes into play. Indicating to a user when something can be interacted with and - more importantly, many times - how it can be interacted with is very important. Usually such indications will also inform about what kind of result will happen from the interaction: will the form submit, will the page reload, will I see a list of additional options?
Just as important is indicating to the user that yes - you just interacted with something that can be interacted with. Depending on the action, this can be something as subtle as an underline - or as obvious as showing a loading indicator.
The Material animations aren't just eyecandy for the sake of eyecandy. While touch screens are getting better, there are still situations where a touch doesn't necessarily register as a touch. It's super important to indicate to the user that a touch has been registered. It's just as important that this happens immediately, instead of after - say - a round-trip request to a server somewhere.
If you've built and designed a user interface that has amazing affordances, a general perception of 'speediness' even if the server is being slow, and treats touch users as a first-class citizen ... I'd really like to see your work!
having content areas fly in for almost a whole second is overkill
In the Material design, animations are also intended to increase affordance by showing what areas are interactive, without requiring the extra chrome of everything having 3D borders.
I like that they make me think about things like depth to differentiate what's active , I like the little line in inputs ,it encourages users(me included) to fill the input,
the ripple effect is small and cheap animation and communicates to the user a click .as is with checkbox etc
the morphing transitions is their best idea , As a user I hate flickers , if you blink you miss them overlay are even worse unless you are alerting.
Web browser engines are not particularly good in animation. I was viewing this with (not quite latest) Firefox and the animations were really choppy (with my less than 3GHz PC). As in really annoying and made user interaction next to impossible. Other browsers may work better.
Secondly, animation (especially in browsers) is very power consuming if you target mobile devices. Of course, this isn't something a web designer would have to care about, because unlike for "native" apps, you can't tell which web site was consuming all the battery. (and battery consumption means bad reviews in app stores)
I work for a mobile device company and I can tell you, for every minute a major web designer spends adding animation on a popular web site, a systems engineer spends an hour trying to optimize the power consumption (with changes to WebKit/Blink, device drivers and the kernel).
Web browsing power consumption is a major benchmark how device manufacturers choose their parts vendors. One of the key benchmarks is picojoules required to render nytimes.com front page. (this is ridiculous but that's how the industry works)
Quite simply: your design would be a lot better if you'd remove most (if not all) of the animations. Especially the mouse click circle (which appears so late it's distracting) and the things that scroll from the bottom (which scroll so choppily that it's annoying). They don't add anything to the usability of this site, on the contrary they make it work slowly.
Otherwise I like the aesthetic of your design.