I remember in the early 2000's when compositing window managers first came about people went wild with the effects in the most tacky way possible (me too -- it was fun at the time!) Everything transparent, rotating cubes for different desktops, weird animations on everything. Once it became common place though, actual designers started to show some restraint...
Anyway, whatever Apple is doing right now reminds me a lot of that.
Yeah, don't forget wobbly windows! I think a lot of people dreamed of actually having a UI like Minority Report or something, but people quickly realised the difference between fiction and the reality of actually getting things done.
These days I use a minimal tiling window manager and no animations whatsoever. As I'm of a certain age I still get a kick out of the fact I can make a floating window translucent and see the video playing underneath. But that's only because I know it was a technical feat to get there. It's hard to imagine why gen Z or younger would get a kick out of this stuff, though.
The main difference: installing Compiz was a decision and effort from the user, an opt-in feature. I also did tried it, and ditched it after a week. With this I have less freedom. This is more like gnome 3, which caused my ditch Gnome and linux desktop completely, and switch to windows (which has its downsides and quirks).
Compiz is the name everyone remembers, but the Beryl fork was what had all the excessive effects. When the projects merged back together into Compiz Fusion they dropped like 60-70% of the functionality, and then dropped even more when it was later renamed back to Compiz.
I had a highly customized setup I really liked (I was even using the advanced features to target dropdowns and popups to give them their own effects, or disable effects for specific programs for speed), the only reason I moved away from it was all the customization disappearing. Some of that dropped functionality included keyboard controls for new ways to navigate or arrange windows, losing those indirectly led me to tiling window managers.
Anyway, whatever Apple is doing right now reminds me a lot of that.