What is the purpace of 'bakeing' and animation?

baking in relation to animation might mean setting up a physics solution, letting it run, the 'baking' that physics simulation down into actual key frames so it can be exported as canned animation. This ends up being very useful when animating.

Say setting up some dominoes or a crumbling wall, setting up everything as colliders, running a physics sim, and baking what happens to keyframes. So you don't have to actually meticulously hand key the damn things falling over one by one, bit by bit, you just turn what happens to the object during the sim into raw position/rotation transforms/trajectories and collapses the sim into key frames. You will get a much more realistic animation in the end as well as being basically a lot easier.

also using modifiers in the anim too. like setting up a bone chain, adding a wave modifier. saves you trying to make chain do a wave motion, and the modifiers are procedural too. so you can tweak them forever and easily get infinitely varied results just by changing a few parameters.