I disable all animations everywhere (Android, Windows, Gnome) because I hate that they make me feel like I'm losing time waiting for something that could be instant, and they sometimes make me dizzy. I'm particularly exasperated that iOS doesn't offer that possibility.
But rotating an image is one of the rare use cases where I do want the animation. It makes me see what action happened, with which rotation angle, without having to think twice.
Huh, good point. True.
The motion itself indeed gets picked up intuitively by the brain.
Okay, I'm convinced that picture rotation should be animated to the exact degree that achieves this.