I know with performance issues distinguishing between a fix and a workaround can seem arbitrary. In this particular case I have a plan which seems to work in preliminary testing. And it works more reliably, and faster/smoother, without forcing frequency scaling harder. The animations are not as you say “processing intensive and, by its very nature, demands a processing burst”. They’re just being slowed down by a bug for which higher frequencies are a workaround, but it’s also possible to fix. That set of fixes is my current focus this month.
I agree more responsive frequency scaling would improve the user experience, as I have experienced myself when I first proposed it. Although that got reverted because it exposed bugs in the Wayland backend so will need to be reattempted in future. And I made another different attempt at scaling over the new year. So I haven’t given up on scaling, only deprioritised it for the moment.