Well… I don’t know what he said, but for me, the issue here isn’t the floating label but more the badly designed floating labels you’re showing. I see a design issue here, not a “technical” issue.
Just my two cents
Most of the arguments are based on really bad designed fields. If you know material design guidelines well, you know most of these issues are already sorted in terms of UI design. Spacing is saved by not boxing each input but using a line below to indicate where they are, so on top of each you have blank space and as much as you want to set the placeholder.
For the “label can go over…” yes, it can, but it can also do on a regular input… this argument is just nonsense. You do a big input in material and you get 2 or even 1000 lines of text within without going over the field, it just expands vertically as much as needed. If you use a 50 words placeholder you’ll have issues with floating and regular labels… not an specific issue of floating labels.
No space for hints? I think you should check this out. Hints, errors… https://material.io/guidelines/components/text-fields.html#text-fields-states
Being floating doesn’t equals to having a badly designed form, it could be a nicely designed one and still be floating (Material as reference).
The only issue I see on them vs classic “on top placeholder” style is that placeholder becomes smaller when you type and here, indeed, some aged people or people who has visual handicaps can get trouble to read it, but this depends on your target as well, not every form is meant to be filled by this target.
From the current solutions on forms out there, I think it’s one of the bests so far. Keeps placeholders always visible, and in terms of UI makes a very much cleaner structure, and visually looks more vivid with the small animations and not so boring. Yeah, objective of a form is to get the outcome, I agree, but how you feel when doing it for me also makes impact. If you don’t think, ask Typeform guys why they became so famous by doing WELL designed forms instead of boring chunks of fields one on top of the other.
