Google isn't some all-knowing authority on UX/UI. In fact, their UI is pretty terrible for most applications. It's hard to tell what you can or can't click. There are hidden controls everywhere.
You can decide to blindly follow standards or do some real user testing and see how well your UI works for people. Stand over someone's shoulder while they use it for the first time and see how quickly they figure it out. Do some A/B testing.
For the record, the UX/UI community in general had a lot of negative reactions to Material when it was introduced:
https://medium.com/tech-in-asia/material-design-why-the-floa...
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/material-design-and-the-myst...