My experience is that CTOs don't care about animations, rounded corners, or what not - they care about metrics. These artsy bullshit layouts are suggested by design teams and the technical side either doesn't care/is content to delegate or there's someone at director level who wants to be the next Steve Jobs and empowers design.
This isn't to say that all design is bad - good design is hard and most software engineers are really bad at it and undervalue its impact on users - but if you blindly trust design you can end up with garbage like what this article talks about.
It's so funny to see an incompetent CTO thinking things like, as the example, animations, is just designers being designers. Go ahead and remove ChatGPT animations and make the user wait for the whole text to be ready without any feedback. Let me know how those metrics go.
Animations are not necessarily bullshit, but all of the sites in the linked list of rewards are. Sites which hijack scroll to do something else ("you scrolled down and watch the window in this picture of a house open up and reveal the next text block") are an example of something in vogue amongst designers which are harder to read, harder to navigate, and are just artsy bullshit.
This CTO is bugging designers to not do anything moving and insisted on adding a "no animation" mode to our apps.
Yet, our designers still insist on adding "bling" to webpages. I'll try harder...
And I've seen similar attitudes in other CTOs, it's mostly marketing/product guys who end up being responsible for the animations. They tend to be far less technical.
This isn't to say that all design is bad - good design is hard and most software engineers are really bad at it and undervalue its impact on users - but if you blindly trust design you can end up with garbage like what this article talks about.