[caseyy]

I don't entirely agree with other commenters saying it's uninspired. It is neutral, but many functional considerations go into making a UI framework, and neutrality serves an important purpose.

However, given Material's popularity, I think it's inevitable that poorly designed/unergonomic apps will cheapen M3 a lot in the coming years. Same as it happened with Material 2. It used to be associated with clean, professionally developed apps; then it became associated with the worst of the worst and a lot of mediocre stuff, too. Sturgeon's Law is not kind to these things.

[bsimpson]

When Matias was in charge of Material, he said the purpose of design guidance isn't to raise the peaks but to fill the valleys. An expert can come up with something that's more appealing/usable than slinging the components together, but someone without that expertise should be able to make something pretty compelling by following the practices set out by people who had it.

[caseyy]

That's a good point. And it's a noble effort by the Google Design team. Unfortunately good will and good efforts are sometimes abused.

[ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7]

It definitely has influenced how people build applications, and has improved the common language people use to refer to many patterns.