As a user it's super un-intuitive, though. At least how gmail, calendar, maps and other google apps are on Android at the moment. I mostly click and pray.
It's interesting that lots of people on HN say the same thing: I don't know how to perform an action; there are no affordances in the UI.
But Google is a data driven company and they must, surely, have scads of data on this. They must know what their users are trying to do and how they're trying to do it, so why are Google interfaces so hard to use?
As a tech enthusiast, I occasionally get surveys to possibly sign up to try out a new version of a Google UI. I've never actually done it because the time windows don't usually work out, but signing up for these user studies is definitely something I ended up in by being in the tech crowd.
But I also have done a lot of tech support for senior citizens, who don't have the innate ability to stumble through bad UI like a lot of us millenial-types do. I feel like Google is talking to the wrong people.
I suspect that if Google UI designers spent some time in senior citizen communities watching people use their email, almost everything about how Google designs web pages would be thrown away.
I think you are exaggerating a bit but there is some truth in what you say but that's not Material design's fault. It's Google's that doesn't follow their own guidelines.
Do not confuse "Material" with "Anything made by Google".
