Sadly GNOME seems to be missing (or has removed) options to disable all of the annoying stuff it's doing.
To disable the stupid workspace switching animation you have to install an entire extension. I installed this one directly from github, the code is tiny, you can read it.
To turn off the hotcorner that I continually accidentally hit there is apparently no longer a UI option, but running:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-hot-corners false
worked.
Annoyingly the UI control you do have is not anywhere intuitive like with GNOME in the name. It's in "tweaks" and "extensions". Tweaks is where you can adjust font size, Extensions is where the workspace switching toggle shows up and also where you can disable the applications menu.
