I've opined about the atrocious announcement pages from Google before (across the board they are offensively sucky), but to give that a rest and speak on-topic about the announcement in question -- good lord what a step back it is, how ugly, insipid, spiritless, and unimpressive it is. Expressive? It's exactly the opposite. Material team, what have you got against shadows, soft bevels, borders, those 2px worth of adornments which carry the weight of gold in terms of communicating clickability, state, different types of buttons, providing instrumental cues and abstraction about everything, why have you failed to learn from UI/UX of the decades behind you?
It's even infecting Flutter, because it wants to push Material. This is genuinely depressing. And makes me appreciate the command of Steve Jobs, the guy leading Stripe, etc. because when you see abysmal offerings like these, you just can't help to.
And it's phenomenally hard to not be judgmental about this, because after release after release it shows they are not learning.
I've been using Flutter again recently because every time I need a workout timer, I spend ages looking for non-adware/crapware in mobile app stores then just writing my own.
This latest version exists because the previous one bit rot so hard it wouldn't compile any more and got removed from the Play Store (and the NHS Couch to 5k app I wanted to use was region-locked). Flutter web output still sucks, but it's better than dealing with any amount of Xcode or Android builds for a one-user app:
https://flutter-workout-timers.netlify.app/
I also used it as an opportunity to create separate Material and Cupertino versions you can switch between, and Material 3 just looks like... well, the complete opposite of expressive. I could just be holding it wrong, of course.
The M3 docs I consulted while making it have always been diabolical, with the most overblown, laggy delayed image loading/placeholder stuff I've ever seen, even on a powerful desktop with fast internet.
My hot take is that material started with only one goal in mind: we need a visual design vocabulary for mobile but it must absolutely look different from iOS. And by going with this in mind they threw the bath water, the baby, and half of the bathroom