I think what's interesting is they canonized the bottom navigation (https://material.io/guidelines/components/bottom-navigation....), a notable move given that many popular Android apps have historically opted to design the navigation of their app around the navigation drawer(https://material.io/guidelines/patterns/navigation-drawer.ht...), a philosophy that made the Android platform UI a bit distinct from iOS.

Personally, I find a bottom navigation of primary functionality to be far more pleasing than having to tap twice. For example, on iOS Spotify was quite arduous to navigate when they tried simplifying the aesthetic by having all the navigation within side menus. Their later re-design to move content back into the bottom navigation was met with a lot of praise amongst users.