Do smooth hover effects actually ruin the user experience?

Spent time adding cool button transitions and modal popups to make our web app look high end. Visually it looked awesome but in actual testing people kept double clicking things thinking the app froze.

Turns out users just want instant feedback when they click something. As soon as we removed those extra visual delays everything felt way snappier even though the backend speed didn't change at all.

Are you guys still using smooth micro animations or do you prefer instant button clicks now?