Take macOS as an example. The current space is shown as the largest view, which is silly because you’re already on it. The other spaces are shown as little thumbnails you can hardly see the contents of. You can either slide between spaces one at a time or click. In the cube, each face is the same size, you can see the backside of each window and you can view each window’s contents from an angle. It’s the same reason a book is easier to flip through than a Kindle.
I really wish we could shake this strange obsession with minimalism and return to embracing skeuomorphic representations. Computers should adapt to us, not us to them. We have insane transistor counts and memory density at our disposal. Why shouldn’t we take advantage of that to provide even questionable benefits, as you put it, to our user experience?
I guess it depends on how beneficial you consider whimsy. I'll trade a little efficiency for a little whimsy most days.
That's what scrollbars used to be good at, before they were dumbed down for dubious aesthetic reasons.
On Gnome, when I switch left/right between virtual workspaces, the animation provides some indication of the switch.
When I tried xfce, there was no animation, it didn't feel like an improvement.
Perhaps this is down to preferences.
Yet "smooth scrolling" is latency, and to most who are already used to scrolling, it is extremely unpleasant.
When one does scroll (i.e. move the viewport of a larger screen that's being presented through the inside of a window), it is because one wishes to already be seeing the target position.
Any latency through added animation destroys the illusion.
I quickly close any webpage that forces that strong discomfort upon me. And switch away from any application that does it against my wishes.
I remember I even used it without the switch animation, as the latency irritated me.
Just to fiddle by manually grabbing the cube and spinning it, while thinking.
It did well to establish the idea that your current desktop was just a portion of a much larger surface, and by switching desktops you were changing the portion you were working in. It also leveraged spatial memory, as many Mac UI features over the years have.
The implementation in current versions of macOS, which is your typical linear setup similar that found in GNOME, is harder to conceptualize for users because its animations don’t communicate nearly as effectively, plus by default desktops move around based on frequency of usage which screws with spatial memory.
Otherwise, this is a great way to see where you put that window you are looking for.
OTOH, it could actually helpful to conceptualize the idea of virtual desktops.
Once already used to virtual desktops, the cube becomes cruft.