I havent daily driven android with material 3, so I cant comment on what current state is, but original material was basically a heavy emphasis on "real world" z-index, thinking of your UI like a stack of documents on a table, + a "kinetic" feel.
EDIT: also, I have to say as someone who did a lot of app dev on both iOS and android, I really appreciate the design system that google came up with in terms of codifying and simplifying especially the colors. They came up with a system that was able to distill your themes to something like 6 colors total (in the beginning, things have grown since) and that effectively served a vast majority of use cases and UI paradigms. And the way they categorized them made it really simple as an app dev to understand how and when to use them (also their grid was a much more 'engineering' way to think about things, and so that clicked with me as well)
