Animations are CPU Intensive and definitely not "minimalist", so should not be in the default panel config
The default panel setup for Xfce should not include animations. Animations are CPU intensive. I've run Debian Xfce on a Raspberry Pi 1 and the animation of the bottom panel took like 5 minutes to complete (ok I'm exaggerating).
I'm not suggesting removing the animation and keeping the bottom panel, since that leads to precious screen real estate being wasted and I already filed a bug report about that years ago ( https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14918 ). Instead I propose completely removing the bottom panel. I've been using Xfce for about a decade (probably will for the rest of my life) and the first thing I do after installing is delete the bottom panel. It's just useless. Every button down there can instead be put on the top panel, to the right of the "Applications" button, but to the left of the "open windows" section. On Microsoft Windows these are often referred to as "quick launchers".
It seems like the only reason the bottom panel is there is to mimic the MacOS look; but really you shouldn't, Apple sucks.
Kinda Off-Topic (but actually pretty related): The Applications Menu in top-left of screen should not show the "button title" (the word "Applications") by default, it should just be an icon. Or maybe a compromise could be to shorten the word to "Apps"?