Ah, the new Stripe design.
https://dribbble.com/shots/13676278-Home covers it, and the comments on it are unanimously positive (and also shallow).
Yet I open https://stripe.com and observe a page mostly incapable of hitting 60fps in its animations, which doesn’t scroll smoothly because of this, and which is intensely CPU-demanding (it immediately makes my laptop’s fans spin up, and I imagine it’d be draining the battery far quicker than normal). And that’s what I end up focusing on, rather than any prettiness. I don’t like websites that make my browser slow and my computer noisy, and will tend to close them far more quickly—either immediately, or go in, get the information, get out, rather than perhaps lingering.
They’ve focused on subjective prettiness at substantial and unnecessary cost. They could have implemented something just as subjectively pretty that didn’t perform so terribly, but they didn’t. (Fortunately it’s only the front page that suffers in this way.)
And on Dribbble: this sort of response is pretty standard: when something popular and pretty comes up, people seldom make any critical comment on even glaring usability problems. When something is obviously a catastrophically bad idea, maybe one or two people pipe up as dissenters, but even then their feedback will be muted. And don’t get me started on how people present their web design screenshots, framing them on a background that is essential to making key aspects of the design work, but which will be necessarily absent in the actual deployment—this is rank dishonesty, in my opinion, but it’s also ubiquitous on the platform.
As with Stripe’s popularity, these Dribbble things are a deliberate culture thing (problem, I’d say): the Dribbble community is interested in prettiness and doesn’t want to hear about impracticality or any form of negative feedback. This has probably helped with the platform’s popularity—it lets you feel good, everyone likes what you’ve made. Being largely invitation-only has also helped them create and sustain this echo chamber. (“Echo chamber” is a term too freely used, but it’s quite apt on Dribbble.) Otherwise I might create an account named “Honest Critic” and make a habit of pointing out problems in shots—not to be a downer or to condemn their work, but to help them improve it, and hopefully realise that they should care about these things.