My sad millennial take is: We're in the brain rot era, if a piece of content doesn't have immediate animation / video and that "wowww" sound byte nobody pays attention.
My happy millennial take is that browsers have made strides in performance and flexibility, and people are utilizing that to build more complex and dynamic websites.
Simplicity and stillness can be beautiful, and so can animations. Enjoying smooth animations and colorful content isn’t brain rot imo.
It may be unpopular, but my opinion is that web pages must not have non-consensual movement.
I’ll begrudgingly accept a default behavior of animations turned on, but I want the ability to stop them. I want to be able to look at something on a page without other parts of the page jumping around or changing form while I’m not giving the page any inputs.
For some of us, it’s downright exhausting to ignore all the motion and focus on the, you know, actual content. And I hate that this seems to be the standard for web pages these days.
I realize this isn’t particularly realistic or enforceable. But one can dream.
I've seen some site behaviors "rediscovered" lately that have both grated and tickled me because it's apparent the designers are too young to have been a part of the conversations from before the Web was Won.
They can't fathom what a world without near infinite bandwidth, low latency and load times, and disparate hardware and display capabilities with no graphical acceleration looks like, or why people wouldn't want video and audio to autoplay, or why we don't do flashing banners. They think they're distinguishing themselves using variations on a theme, wowing us with infinitely scrolling opuses when just leaving out the crap would do.
I still aim to make everything load within in a single packet, and I'll happily maintain my minority position that that's the true pinnacle of web design.
For sites that have paid enough attention to accessibility you might be able to configure our browser/OS such that this media query applies https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref... - it's designed to encourage offering low motion alternatives
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp2ROiFUZ6w