>As an unintentional experiment, when I got my new phone a few weeks ago I checked “disable animations” first and foremost, and started using the device normally. And everytime I was doing a specific action the screen froze with a round arrow. It took me 5 min to understand that page and app transitions where, well, “animations”, and getting rid of them made for a broken experience.

I don't get it. That sounds like the OS is fundamentally broken that it assumes a hard coded timer is required before it does the next step.