This is Notion, my new nemesis. Sure, on-hover control elements make everything look cleaner. But there’s a downside, too (two, actually).
First (and obvious one) you never sure where to look for controls, and you can’t reach directly for them, because in normal state they are invisible. Doing anything with such a simple hover menu is actually two actions: first you need to hover to see the controls, only then you can do what you were about to do. It makes ALL interaction twice as long for the sake of “clean look at rest”. Not sure I’m happy with that tradeoff.
Second one is that hover effects make UI feel wobbly, unsteady. Just moving mouse around makes things appear and disappear, UI to alter, often without your intent. You don’t feel safe moving mouse around anymore. Changing cursor doesn’t help either. Look at this particular place in the video. So much is going on where normally anything shouldn’t happen at all until I explicitly make a gesture and click something