So am I to understand that your complaint about Gnome has changed from “I have severe performance issues and input lag, even using a desktop i7” to “minimising has a 0.2 second animation, just as practically every other UX has, and rather than just turn it off
No it hasn’t. My complaints about GNOME have expanded a bit, just that. The UI is definitely slower than let’s say Xfce and to make things even worse adds pointless animations.
and rather than just turn it off
That’s the issue, you can’t turn off ALL Gnome animations, there’s a toggle on settings that reduces about 90% of the nonsense but you’ll still get some animations.