I'm a big believer that animations need to validate what you already know, they aren't the information itself.

This means, if you turned animations off you would still work as fast and understand the flow the same as if animations were enabled.

For me, the purpose of animations is to soften the UX journey, and to confirm what I already knew, by giving me small indications that yes, the UI is truly in the state I expect it to be.

Such as fast highlighting of on hover items, so I don't have to correlate the mouse position to the control.

I love that example of tool tip popups taking 0ms once you have popped up one, that is a clear signal that the UX understands you are trying to learn more about the controls you're hovering over.

That's a perfect representation of how animations signal understanding of your UX journey.