They get hate because they are almost always annoying and distract from the actual content. Nobody cares how creative your web page design is if it sucks to use so badly that a plain text page would be better.
But this site got my sister excited about buying the laptop. The stupid animations worked. And I am sure if this was presented to her as a simple html page with a white background and some text it just would not have had the same effect.
Like it or not, most websites are just ads. Interactive billboards. They are not there to present data to you in the best way possible.
https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/
Try to skim this page to get a sense of how much information is on the page. You can't. 90% of the scroll time is stuck in useless animations.
Every time you scroll down you have to wait for the page to render. We've somehow recreated the dialup experience with single page apps.
Your brain is trained on how scrolling works on 95% of pages. Breaking that patterns causes tons of cognitive overhead. You now have to do a double-take every scroll action when you just want to absorb the contents of the page.
But… this website is an ad. It’s not a product spec sheet. It’s not meant for you. It’s meant for people who don’t know a lot about computers or the web, and it’s meant to make them feel something about the product. Its goal is not to present data clearly. And as much as we may hate it, it does a brilliant job at what it’s trying to do. I think dismissing that because you are too deep into the “right way to make websites cult” is so shortsighted.