I think it's not uncommon for good animations to cheat a bit while in motion, rather than look perfect on every frame. Like how cartoons can use smear frames that look bizarre when paused at the wrong time but when viewed as part of a larger animation help sell the motion visually.

Agreed!

With MacOS I felt there was a major quality change for visual quality & animations when SwiftUI was used BY Apple for the OS and applications.

I'm not a developer, but it felt there were areas where an icon or window just didn't visually work the way it used to or SHOULD in placement or animation.

The hackish-ness hasn't changed over time: there are so many examples throughout the OS/Applications that I want to say "it was always like that", except it wasn't: Apple set the bar and it was high, the quality was exceptional.

I feel there are a lot of hacks going on with SwiftUI to achieve the same UI placement or animation.

Last quick note I think about often: a lot of analog creation was really hard. It still is. When it comes to digital we've been thinking we'll come back to things later, but never do... we build more bad on top of bad... sadly.

Yeah the difference is that the blur frames are deliberate and purposeful for the overall effect. The animations showcased here are accidental jank that reveal a clobbered together unpolished app.

I don't think this analogy works because the blur frames look good in motion, and the frames in the blog post look terrible in motion. The animation in the first example is so bad that the first time I watched it I thought there was going to be three buttons at the top at the end, and it was weird and disorienting to realize there was only two.

The game Overwatch is a pretty great contemporary example of this [1]. It has some excellent fluid animations, which look really weird if you freeze frame them.

[1]: https://youtu.be/vIdeGmN__Pw?t=550