I think you’re overestimating how much needless animation helps sales and underestimating how many people are negatively affected by it.
20% of the population has high sensory sensitivity. Many of these people have issues with needless animation. Some people with ADHD also have issues. When you add them all up, it becomes a significant customer base. And even for neurotypical people, excessive animation is distracting. They’re able to tolerate it, but it’s still adding cognitive load.
And it’s been shown through usability studies that carousels are terrible across the board. Marketing people like them for some reason, but there is almost never a good reason for a carousel on the web. Marketing people and some designers like animation because it grabs your attention, and it gets a “wow” in a presentation to executives, but I’m not convinced it actually increases conversions.
I appreciate your response, and I have spoken out against using animation for anything that contains text or can be distracting to anyone (like a shifting pattern beneath static text). I try to talk people out of using carousels, but unfortunately, it often does come down to the executives and marketing people that are paying for the product.
I think that it does get a "wow" in presentation, but better writing and description of your product delivers a more long-term "wow". I just think that most marketing people reach for something easy that is pre-built, than taking the time to really think about how to market their product effectively.
Unless you can go against the wishes of those higher up than you, and show high sales growth, it's often a much easier life to show off a little animation and go after the idea than the presentation when needing to discuss low sales. I work for a digital marketing agency, and often disagree with choices that are made. I just have the ability to influence the backend technology and choices made, so pick my battles. I worked in both front-end as well as backend for a while, but I got burnt out by front-end from management and customers that didn't know any better, more than the constant churn in technology and techniques.
I do agree with you, but 20% is a low number to the type of people that want something to "pop" so they can not know what they are selling, but can show off some fancy animation and let the presentation do all the talking for them. I don't agree with it, but it is negative that the world does work like that most of the time.