>it's a rather negligible delay compared to moving it
That's an irrelevant comparison. If you booked a long flight, would you accept somebody pointlessly delaying it for an hour just because that's short compared to the duration? The correct amount of avoidable latency is zero, regardless of how much unavoidable latency there is.
It's also false; I have a good mouse, good mouse skills, and my taskbar sits against the edge of the screen giving it effectively infinite height (see Fitt's law). I can hit taskbar targets in around 300ms.
You're assuming this is a sequential workflow, which it isn't. Animation is already done by the time you hit a target. I also am fast with the mouse, I used to play and design competitive FPSes for a living, that's precisely why without measurement and considering actual scenarios I have a really hard time believing that this specific thing actually slows anything down for real use cases and isn't just your personal preference/imagination. I disable it too but it's just my preference, as I find it distracting and breaking the focus.
I click the taskbar to minimize/restore the windows, so the animation starts only after I click them. And it's still sequential even if I use the title bar icons, because I have to wait for the animation to finish before I can use the space where the window once was.
That's an irrelevant comparison. If you booked a long flight, would you accept somebody pointlessly delaying it for an hour just because that's short compared to the duration? The correct amount of avoidable latency is zero, regardless of how much unavoidable latency there is.
It's also false; I have a good mouse, good mouse skills, and my taskbar sits against the edge of the screen giving it effectively infinite height (see Fitt's law). I can hit taskbar targets in around 300ms.