I don't need to be a carpenter to say that maybe building a barn out of cotton candy and air balloon animals might not be the best idea.

Your logic is wrong, because it rests on the assumption that everyone agrees using animated radio buttons is a bad idea. Given the number of GitHub stars, upvotes on here, and general use of animation like this across the internet, it's not universally considered a bad idea.

UX design is not a popularity contest, for fuck's sake.

There is a popular confusion of "design" and "making things look fun or pretty".

There is also a popular confusion that design has nothing to do with "making things look fun or pretty", and that anything done to make a site look more attractive is either a waste of time or counter-productive.

No, I don't believe that confusion exists.

Agree.

To some extent it is - sites with better UX will tend to become more popular. I agree that animated radio buttons is probably going to be a bad UX decision in the majority of cases.

The reason I mentioned its stars and upvotes is precisely to point out that some people may have a valid use case for this, and you can't rule it out completely for every radio button on every website.

You know, the number of upvotes on this submission is interesting. There have been much more impressive pure-CSS checkbox-styling and -animating demos, but those posts never got remotely the upvotes of this one.

Just because you can't create, that doesn't discredit criticisms.

Agreed, up to a point. Many film critics have never been directors or actors, and that doesn't detract from their criticisms.

But the OP is releasing this for free, and that helps other people. By crapping on their project with random, unfounded opinions, we discourage them from open sourcing their other code, and that makes the world a worse place. If you don't like an open source project and it's existence isn't doing the world any harm, then just be quiet and move on - or even better, release your own better version.

OP also submitted this link to a discussion site where people don't believe criticism is forbidden or may only be given on the submitter's terms.

Of course criticism is not forbidden - if it was, then I would be flagging these comments for deletion. Instead, I am criticising your comments, and that is also not forbidden nor only allowed on your terms. It works both ways.

You aren't making any criticisms, you're just throwing out a boilerplate demand for people not to harsh anyone's vibe by criticizing anything released open source. (Lest the OP figure out a way to release simple CSS classes in a proprietary format, I guess.) The criticisms aren't particularly "random" or "unfounded", they're on-point: this isn't something that "helps" much, it's just some CSS to make some basic, pointlessly distracting animations.

I dunno, I can see some daylight between skilled carpentry and slapping around some cute CSS.