I have done material design somewhat badly. I would mean a design directly from Google not someone’s reinterpretation of it. You can use it to justify your sloppyness but you could do the same thing in HyperCard.
I'd say Google is widely recognized for "taking poor use of screen real-estate to an art form" with their designs; though Material design is probably just a symptom here, the cause being the ongoing desire to dumb down applications and remove functionality.
Maybe. Still, I go to material.io and I don't see anything there that would make those things better.
I wish there was a UI philosophy that would take Tufte's ideas as a set of core principles: maximizing data-ink ratio, minimizing junk, increasing data density.