The irony is, their Material Design documentation is quite colorful. (and makes much better use of white space)

https://material.google.com/

The problem is, no one at Google is using them in an attractive way.

I agree wholeheartedly, it feels like Google took a hundred steps back. MD is very uninspiring in my eyes.

I think MD is not too bad for mobile. But it becomes brutally, unforgivably incompetent at managing white space on the desktop.

I hope that at some point in the future someone has a design epiphany centered around embracing information density.