Wow I never realized I had this problem until now! I never even considered the reason keys would dispatch to the wrong window was because of the animation. I just knew that sometimes when switching workspaces I'd have to wait until whatever window I'm switching to has focus before typing.
I believe I first learned to shorten animations on MacOSXHints.com (gone now). Regardless, I learned a lot of great "enhancements" here:
https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles
And here's the blog of the person who ran MacOSXHints.com:
https://robservatory.com/make-your-macos-dock-suck/
Fun aside, I'm pretty sure that my mention of a system issue that I read about that morning on MacOSXHints.com was a helper in landing a job in an interview that afternoon. What I mean is, I said, oh are you talking about "whatever thing on that site today…?" and it demonstrated that I was familiar with whatever internals.
Nice resources! I've use MacOS for over ten years and I never really modified anything other than my zshrc. I'll check then out!