> Cookie cutter design is what I like. I can compare the companies when they all have the same template for a website.

Any reference?

Also I do feel like some people prefer animations. Maybe not the Hackernews crowd itself per se. But I think that having two options (or heck three the third one being really just pure html just text no styling maybe some simple markdown) is something good in my opinion.

Honestly I do feel like 1-2 animations are okay with a website but the award winning websites really over spam it in my opinion

I think maybe the amount of animations in https://css-tricks.com might be nice given that those guys/website teaches other people about animation themselves and have only 1 maybe 2 animations that I can observe interacting with their website and I do feel like that's for good reason (they don't want animations to be too distracting)

I personally don't know, I personally have never built any such websites but recently wanted to and I was looking at gsap tuturials on today & I do feel like one of the frustrations I feel is that these animations don't respect the browser sometimes to have animations (Scroll animations being the first one) but I even watched some designers talk about how much important scroll animations are (them betting that every award winning website has scroll animations)

Even https://ycombinator.com has a lots of animations & Css features & people on HN did love it from what I could tell. So to me, it does feel as if there is no one size fits all.