It's every action on Mac and iOS that does this, and it has been increasing in intrusiveness for a decade. I can't be sure why they do it, but it comes off as though their visual designers are immature, thinking we want to see their impressive animations not just in a demo, not just in a tutorial that we go through once, where we are meant to grasp the relationships between the things, but over and over again, all day long, for decades.

I freaking don't. One time was plenty. I don't want any animation. And the "reduce animation" feature's implementation is a slap in the face: all the delay -- that part is non-negotiable apparently -- but with blurry crossfades instead.

It is absolutely, positively mind boggling that you have to sit through those animations. And key presses don’t even take effect if your new desktop until the animation is done. It’s just lunacy.

How does a company with infinite resources and talented designers come up with shit like that??

yes! it's the worst!

I've been using Instant Space Switcher (which got a small callout in tfa) as a targeted fix for this, and it's lifechanging

You can also do Ctrl-UpArrow then click the space you want. This isn't instant, but it might be a little better than repeatedly cycling through each desktop, especially if you have a lot of them. Turning off "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" is also a must IMO.

Personally, I only open one app per desktop and just use Command-Tab. If you hold Command after Command-Tab, you can select an app with having to cycle through all of them.

Tried this? defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.05; killall Dock