Here, take a look.
My intent was to open a plugin panel.
By chance I moved the mouse through the toolbar. I landed on the icon I needed, but then Ai suddenly decided to POP THE TOOLTIP right under my mouse, covering the button I needed — probably because it wanted to show me the tooltip for the last thing my cursor moved THROUGH.

It took me less than half an hour to stumble over it. Given the fact I rely on hotkeys mostly, this means other users happen to encounter this much sooner.

I don’t like these. The idea to have them is good, but there are several problems I see.

1. These should have the Close button in the top right corner. Clicking it could offer two choices: A) Hide this tooltip only, B) Hide all tooltips. Choosing B then could show a shy message 'You can always toggle rich tooltips in Preferences > General' (sure, not per tooltip basis, so option A makes it harder to manage, so perhaps B only... anyway, forcing new users to dive into Preferences to close these... how would they know?)

2. If I have toolbar with 2 columns, a tooltip for a tool in the left column covers the right column, obstructing me from picking the one I could have needed (you can’t be sure my aiming wasn’t off!)

3. The animation is sooo candy and slow-paced. Each time another starts, the cursor is pompously arcs from the edge of the frame, and the user has to wait to see the main action. This isn’t a solo! It’s a convenience store, a workshop rack! Most of time I see these there’s nothing shown but the background and a cursor, rolling out slowly, like a diva. Each of these were designed in a vacuum.

4. The timing is off. When I hover over another tool, the animation’s frame from the previous one is shown! When I move over another tool already, the animation from the previous one the mouse left is still playing! All of this mess blinks, stutters, misses tools the cursor hovers over currently, irritates and obstructs.

What the team should do is to grab GIFs from other apps that have these. Study them frame by frame, measure delays and see where the hit areas are.
Right now there’s zero reason to use them. Sure I know what these do. But I’d never use these for any other tool if I never knew how these tools work.

Adobe Illustrator 30.2.1
Running on Mac Sonoma 14.8.2 (23J126)

But to be honest this issue has been happening for about 2 years. All on Sonoma on 2 different macbook pros.

I think it's because hover time for overlays is too sensitive and maybe I am moving my mouse around and it triggers the overlay and it stays up. But I swear sometimes it just pops up for no reason.

My workspace has a lot of panes open as I like all my features avaiable but this should not really affect that.

@David - What's the Illustrator version at your end?

This

The rich tool tips. I searched online and found that you can just turn them off. But literally they would just pop up randomly when I was working sometimes.

Preferences/General/Show Rich Tool Tips [ ] untick

David, which ones? What do these say?