It's Christmas, lighten up. I think the animation adds a glorious bit of irony: "look, here's a horribly distracting effect that is almost designed to make it difficult to read the article, and it's still not as egregious as Apple's Tahoe design!"
It's a shame the author didn't test on mobile, but I think we should cut them some slack. It would be understandable for this particular article's audience to mostly be viewing on desktop.
Even if they were being hypocritical, I think the impact of briefly-bad UI on someone's blog post pales in comparison with bad UI in a product of macOS scale.
I don't know, I figure with a billion dollars Apple should be able to do much better at being awful than this. More proactive rather than accidental awfulness. Something that isn't just bad but capital intensive at the same time. Anyone can build a bad UX on a few menus, or a whole system incrementally over time. But to really lean in? Maybe commission famous artists with eye watering fees for each icon, truly over the top marketing campaigns, really get the cash-fired furnaces going. Really just go full-potlatch on things.
