An example that comes to mind is a slider switch (iOS is famous for them)

You don’t want the switch activated until it’s all the way left or right.

An even simpler example is page-based navigation. Can't register UI hits while pages are animating in and out.

What if you want to quickly flick through pages? Having to wait for each page to render would be awful.

Slider controls might be a better example, I think. In that case, the position reached by the moveable element is the data, and it is appropriate to take the value from the UI element (of course, if it lags noticeably, that is a UI design issue.) With slider switches, you could argue it either way, so long as program and UI remain consistent, but again there is a problem if the UI response lags the gesture.

Video games use animations as easy to project information to a player. If your character is “stunned” and can’t move, the animation should play for the duration of the status effect.

Sure. But that’s an inherent feature of the animation. In this case the “never” rule doesn’t apply. If animations are a side effect, you want to treat them as such.

The never rule not applying what what I was giving an example of!

But should any buttons pressed during that time be queued? Command queueing and cancellation is an important part of game design.

Tetris