My issue seems similar with #12267, I left a comment there but since that issue is closed, people might not read it.
@matsko worked on that issue.

ng-hide-add and ng-hide-remove classes are not generated. I am not using Material.

Debugging ngAnimate I noticed that all animations are skipped because:

• function 'areAnimationsAllowed' always returns false because:
  • rootElementDetected is always false because:
    • $rootElement var points to the element before the actual root element:

The element $rootElement points to is a comment and it is inserted by the ui-view directive which is present on the angular root element.
"ui-view" is a directive belonging to https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-router.

When ngAnimate is initialized $rootElement receives the correct value but probably when ui-router inserts its comment right before the angular root element, $rootElement is not updated. So when the animation happens, $rootElement points to instead of