Animations are essential for presenting mathematical concepts visually to help more of the audience follow along. Also, rendering LaTeX. Google Slides makes you use other tools and only clunkily lets you insert them into your presentation.

It's not PowerPoint ala 97 with spinning text. It's highlights or a story based presentation where thing unfolds, or perhaps interacting with something without leaving the slides. Adjusting parameters in a graph. Which is hard to do in Google. The end result of each slide could still be compiled to a static pdf. Think like a 3bluebrown video, or numberphile or something. You don't want static for all kinds of presentations, that's hyperbole.

I suggest watching a lecture by Matt Might. I used to hate animations but he used them in ways that I found incredibly helpful to understand concepts like parsing transforms and stuff.

There's useful animations—guiding the audience that something has changed for ex.

Then there's the terrible animations—a gif of a meme playing in an infinite loop. These make the slide unwatchable for me.

Agreed. I've given a few conference talks and found judicious animations super helpful when I'm presenting code.

Showing 10 lines of code on a screen at once is a surefire way to have the audience either not read/understand it or to read it, but ignore what I'm saying. So I like to build up a slide full of code by starting with a couple line (eg the function definition), then adding a few more, then a few more, and then the whole thing. Subtly animating the new line in is a great way to highlight what's changing. Double-so if I'm reordering lines. Otherwise the code is just flashing from one state to another and it's not always obvious what happened.

Even better, I sometimes want to walk through the execution of code. I love having a red arrow highlighting what line we're on, and animating it between positions is a good way to highlight that we're moving from one thing to the next, especially with non-linear jumps (like from the end of a loop back to the top).

Animation is an easily-abused tool, but it's also a powerful one.

It’s not ideal to have slides that only work if everyone is paying attention at all times. This animation should not be used to impart information. You can highlight changes in other ways.

I'd be curious to hear how you'd do the execution flow like they mention? Just use multiple sequential slides?

I'm not sure if this is considered animation or not, but I've demonstrated code refactors between slides by adding a colored border around the code in question (both in the before and in the after slide).

I'd probably do something similar for stepping through code. But at that point it's a quasi-animation (albeit, one that can still be understood by pdf slides).

> Any presentation that can't be presented in static pdf is a presentation I'd rather miss.

I feel the complete opposite - if the presentation can be distilled in a static PDF, I'd rather just read the blog post. The entire point of a presentation is being engaged with the speaker to me.