It’s fine if you don’t want animations, your opinion is valid if you don’t like them, but you’re conflating a design choice with the idea of a “response”. You can’t disagree with the fact that the arrow buttons on the site are the complete response. It makes no sense to say that, because those buttons do nothing else; their single solitary function is to trigger an animated scroll, and once the animation is done playing, there is nothing else involved in the “response”.

Yes, the length of animation is a design choice, and is in that sense avoidable — precisely because the length of time the animation plays was a conscious intent. What you’re talking about is not related to what Doherty’s paper was talking about.