The more I push my machines, the more I disable some of the cool stuff in macOS. So this is a minor one, but you can easily disable finder animations by dropping the DisableAllAnimations key into com.apple.finder using the defaults command, as follows:
defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true; killall Finder
To reverse the change:
defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true; killall Finder
